Palminteri talks it up

THE Times Square rehearsal space is mostly bare, with only a door stoop mapped out on the otherwise empty stage. There eventually will be a minimal set, several lighting cues and a few sound effects and music. But when Chazz Palminteri launches the revival of his “A Bronx Tale” on Broadway, it will be almost all Palminteri and hardly anything else.

When most little plays graduate from a 72-seat waiver house to a 947-seat auditorium on 48th Street, they collect all kinds of bells and whistles. As it’s taken 18 years for Palminteri to finally get his one-man show to Broadway, he and director Jerry Zaks could be excused for reworking the once-small show into something bigger than it ever was before. Yet Palminteri is convinced “A Bronx Tale” works just as well today as it did when it premiered in 1989 at the tiny West Coast Ensemble. The Walter Kerr Theatre is definitely a whole lot larger than that Hollywood space, but when his one-man play opens in New York on Thursday, it will be just as intimate as ever, without significant script revisions.

For such an undersized play (it runs barely 90 minutes), “A Bronx Tale” accomplished a lot. When Palminteri first performed his semi-autobiographical account of a young boy’s education, he was a 37-year-old nobody with scarcely a penny to his name. But the one-man show so electrified Los Angeles that it transformed the struggling actor into a Hollywood hotshot nearly overnight.

“A Bronx Tale” was that rare show that not only created a movie star -- Palminteri would go on to appear in more than 30 feature films, including “Bullets Over Broadway” and “The Usual Suspects” -- but also cemented the reputation of an uncompromising artist: Besieged by movie producers dangling huge sums for “A Bronx Tale’s” movie rights, Palminteri refused to sell unless he could star in and write the film.

Robert De Niro eventually granted Palminteri’s wish, turning Palminteri’s theater piece into a critically lauded 1993 movie that De Niro costarred in and directed. But one thing continually eluded Palminteri’s one-man show: a Broadway staging of the monologue itself. While “A Bronx Tale” did appear off-Broadway in 1989, Palminteri kept hoping his theater fortunes would change.

“You know why I am excited?” the now-55-year-old actor says after completing his third day of rehearsals. “Because I really, really wanted to do it. It’s my Broadway debut. I always wanted to be on Broadway, and I just feel so confident of the material. I know it works.”

“A Bronx Tale” unfolds in and around the intersection of 187th Street and Belmont Avenue in the 1960s. Palminteri plays a dozen and a half characters, but at the center of the piece stand three central players: a young boy named Cologio; his bus-driving father, Lorenzo; and a neighborhood gangster named Sonny.

From the play’s beginning, when Cologio is 9, to its conclusion, when he is 17, Cologio is torn between his cautious and sometimes absent father and the round-the-clock excitement -- dice, violence, drama -- that Sonny offers. Both men love Cologio in their own ways, but the young man ultimately must decide what kind of life he wants to lead. “I learned something from these two men,” the play’s narrator (a grown Cologio) says near the play’s end. “I learned to give love and get love unconditionally. And I learned the greatest gift of all: The saddest thing in life is wasted talent and the choices you make will shape your life forever.”

The play is filled with colorful bit parts -- Rudy Ice, Frankie Coffee Cake, Eddie Mush -- and Palminteri gives every one of them a distinctive personality and voice. But those who either witnessed the play nearly two decades ago or saw the movie know that “A Bronx Tale” is as much a performance piece as it is a poem, an elegy to an era and one young man’s coming of age.

A bit of providence

Like the good fortune that intervenes in Cologio’s life, the Broadway production of “A Bronx Tale” was the result of some unforeseen providence.

Palminteri was playing the title role in the independent film “Yonkers Joe,” about a gambling cheat and his son. About halfway into production this year, Palminteri was having dinner with Trent Othick, one of the film’s producers. “I have something I want to talk about,” Palminteri told Othick, the producer recalls.

The idea was to restage “A Bronx Tale” on Broadway, and Palminteri was talking to the right person. “I have seen the movie probably 100 times,” Othick says. Among Othick’s Las Vegas friends, lines from the movie are quoted endlessly. “But it’s not just a mob movie,” Othick says. “I definitely think the story is timeless -- and there are so many good messages in the play that I think a lot of people should hear. And it didn’t get enough exposure as a play or a movie.”

With Othick and partners Matt Othick (Trent’s brother) and John Gaughan on board to finance the revival, Palminteri called his talent agent, who also represents director Zaks. In a matter of weeks, “A Bronx Tale” had its backers, a director and a theater.

“Honestly, I don’t recall ever doing a one-man show,” says Zaks, whose Tony wins include “Guys and Dolls” and “Six Degrees of Separation.” “But in a way it doesn’t feel like a one-man show, because there are so many characters.”

When he first performed the piece, Palminteri was single and without children. Now he’s got an 11-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter. So while the play hasn’t changed, Palminteri’s stake in its lessons has. “It resonates even better for me, being a father. The things that my father said to me I now say to my son.”

At the same time, Palminteri isn’t the same man he was when he launched the play. “Part of the process is getting back in stage shape,” says Zaks. “It’s about conditioning and endurance. It’s like a boxing match.”

But just three days into rehearsal, Palminteri was almost completely off book, having relearned the 47-page script that fast. A few weeks later in previews, he was so comfortable with the material that the play unfolded like a dinner conversation with a loquacious uncle.

“If I was too old, if I felt like I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t do it,” Palminteri says. “It’s a little like Mickey Mantle. As long as I can still play the game as good as I played it before, I’ll play. . . . But I do it and it still is strong -- it’s still good. I’m young enough to do it now, but I have to do it now.”

If the 1989 “Bronx Tale” immediately established Palminteri as a coveted actor, the revival may remind some of what he still can do. Although Palminteri was nominated for best supporting actor in Woody Allen’s 1994 comedy “Bullets Over Broadway,” the top-notch roles don’t come as often as they did in the 1990s. For the most part, Palminteri now plays character roles and voices in animated films.

“It could remind people -- sure, that’s a possibility,” the actor says. “It never hurts to be out there. And people might say, ‘You know what, he might be good for this!’ That’s the business: They see you, and they go, ‘I’m doing this movie, and he’d be great for that.’ ”

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john.horn@latimes.com