Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘Bronx Tale’ a well-worn story
The musical-comedy “A Bronx Tale” feels like a story you’ve been told before.
True, the show’s creator Chazz Palminteri originated the material as a one-man show in 1989 and Robert De Niro turned it into a movie in 1993. But that’s not it.
This Broadway version, which debuted on the Great White Way in 2017, has a been-there-seenthat mist settled around the rambunctious production now in a two-week run in Fort Lauderdale. And yet, even though the trope of amusing characters in an ethnic neighborhood teaching a young buck valuable life lessons is a well-worn one, “A Bronx Tale” does it well.
Familiarity isn’t, by definition, a bad thing, particularly if underneath the pizzazz-y veneer of a stage musical there is the bedrock of lived-in experience. The story here is loosely based on Palminteri’s youth in an Italian neighborhood in the 1960s, caught between the love of his bus driver father and the lure of a Mafia boss. The show is co-directed by two-time Academy Award winner Robert De Niro — he directed and starred in the movie and helmed the Broadway show along with Jerry Zaks — who has made a career playing wiseguys.
Through all three iterations the story line is basically the same. At an early age, Calogero (Joey Barreiro, handling the drama and comedy with aplomb) gets in good with the neighborhood mob boss, Sonny (Joe Barbara, whose charisma and stage presence steals the show). Despite being told not to by his hard-working father Lorenzo (Richard H. Blake), Calogero begins secretly hanging out with Sonny and his crew and even forms a gang in the Italian-American neighborhood with his own childhood friends. Things get even more complicated when Calogero falls for Jane (Brianna-Marie Bell), an African-American girl from the black neighborhood a few blocks away.
How this all plays out is so formulaic that the show practically telegraphs the entire second act about two-thirds of the way into the first act.
It is a good show, not a great show. Nonetheless, most of the lasting effects of “A Bronx Tale” — clocking in at a brisk two hours with a 15-minute intermission — will have dissipated by the time you get your car out of the parking garage.
“A Bronx Tale” runs through June 23 at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., in Fort Lauderdale. Showtimes are 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays (and Wednesday, June 19); 1 p.m. Sundays; 6:30 p.m. Sunday, June 16. Tickets range from $40-$145. To order, call 954-462-0222 or go to BrowardCenter.org.