You didn’t have to grow-up in the Bronx or even have visited to get in the mood for Chazz Palminteris A Bronx Tale, on for two more nights at the Long Center.

I saw the show last night, having not seen the 1993 Film, I really had no idea what to expect. When I told one of my colleagues I was going he mentioned something about a mouse and kids, so I suspect he was even further off base than I was. Palminteri wrote the show back in the late 1980’s while unemployed, it’s supposedly a semi-autobiographical tale of his youth in an early 1960’s Bronx neighborhood but I suspect it could equally have been Chicago, DC, Boston, et al.

I really hadn’t been prepared for it to be a one-man show. Palminteri pulled it off magnificently, he moved from character to character with ease and pretty much seamlessly. After all, he’s been doing it for 20-years so he should. It was a engaging dialog about the stresses and strains of living in a working class neighborhood, that was probably more diverse then than now, and the on-off relationship between a son, his father and the neighborhood “boss”.

There is an interesting racial twist to the plot and Palminteri shouts out the N-word partially during a heightened exchange, which I have to say caused some rumblings down in the stalls at the Long Center, but I thought both the scene and the story line were in context with the times, as was the use of the N-word.

Palminteri managed to keep my attention for the full length of the show. Despite the fact that being up in the Mezzanine was more like watching an outdoor theatre in Siberia. It was freezing, I guess less than 64f. Since there are only two more shows, it would be well worth attending, but take a warm top!

It was my first trip to the Long Center since the opening w/e. It was a perfect evening to walk. They’ve got valet parking, there’s parking in the adjacent garage and traffic is carefully managed afterwards to keep the streets clear. Please don’t park in the residential neighborhoods, it may be only one night for you, it’s every night of every day for them.

My Links: NPR Interview with Palminteri back in 2007 on the Broadway opening of a Bronx Tale
Somehat whacky, but recent drive through of the show and 187th St. on YouTube