While “Jersey Boys,” the Tony Award-winning hit about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, appears to be slowing down after a decade-long run, a new musical adaptation of “A Bronx Tale,” appears to be waiting in the wings to take its place, featuring characters drawn from mean streets to the beat of doo-wop, Sinatra-like ballads, and R&B group harmonies. The show, which is currently in a world premiere engagement at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, is co-directed by Jerry Zaks and Robert De Niro and written by Chazz Palminteri. The latter has adapted it from his 1989 memory play about coming of age in a tough Italian neighborhood in the 1960s. Tony and Oscar winner Alan Menken (“Newsies”, “Beauty and the Beast”) and Glen Slater (“School of Rock”) have written the songs. The mostly positive notices have generated buzz that it will be Broadway-bound after its current run ends on March 6.Praising the show as having “heart, humor and a flavorful atmosphere,” the New York Times’s Charles Isherwood noted, “The familiar-as-red-sauce story with most of its rough edges intact, can be found finger-snapping and doo-wopping its way across the stage here, with plans, no doubt, for a quick trip through the Lincoln Tunnel to the big time.”Palminteri, Oscar-nominated for his role as the gangster Cheech in Woody Allen’s “Bullet Over Broadway” (1994), had earlier polished the wise guy patina when in the late 1980s he sat down to pen his autobiographical “A Bronx Tale” as a vehicle for himself. In the one-person show, the actor played a cornucopia of characters, including young Calogero Palminteri, who finds himself torn between his hard-working dad Lorenzo and the more glamorous neighborhood gangster Sonny. The mob boss takes him under his dubiously moral tutelage after young “C,” as he’s called, witnesses a murder and refuses to tell what he knows.“A Bronx Tale,” which had a long off-Broadway run beginning in 1989, proved to be a career breakthrough for Palminteri. Three years later, De Niro chose to make his directorial film debut with a 1993 movie version, in which he played Lorenzo opposite Palminteri’s Sonny. A musical has long been in the planning stages waiting for the right creative team to emerge, including Sergio Trujillo as choreographer.Zaks — who directed De Niro in the film “Marvin’s Room” (1996) and Palminteri in the 2007 Broadway revival of “A Bronx Tale” — has won four Tony Awards, including for the 1992 hit revival of “Guys and Dolls.” De Niro himself made his Broadway debut in 1986, starring as a drug dealer in Reinaldo Povod’s gritty drama “Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” but hasn’t been back since. And while Menken’s eight Oscars indicate the dominance of film in his career, he has lately been much more involved in theater, including the musicals “Sister Act,” “Newsies,” “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” and “Mrs. Doubtfire.”The reviews so far noted that the show could use some rocket fuel, but the cast was uniformly praised, especially Joshua Colley as the young “C” and Nick Cordero as the gangster Sonny. By the way, Cordero was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the musical adaptation of “Bullets Over Broadway” in 2014. His role? Cheech, the same character who brought Palminteri to the apex of his film career. Just watch Cordero be nominated for a Tony for a role with just that same kind of provenance.
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