A Bronx Tale

A Bronx Tale follows a nine-year-old boy who watches a neighbourhood mobster kill a man on his own street, then tells the police he saw nothing. That silence earns him the killer's protection, and sets up a tug of war over the rest of his childhood.

Calogero grows up between two men who both want to raise him. Lorenzo, his father, drives a bus, pays his bills and believes that working for a living is the only thing that makes a man. Sonny runs the corner and can settle anything with a word. As Calogero gets older the pull sharpens, and a girl he is not supposed to be seeing makes the unwritten rules of the block impossible to keep.

Chazz Palminteri wrote the book, adapting the solo play he first performed in 1989 and later turned into a film. Alan Menken composed the score and Glenn Slater wrote the lyrics, and Robert De Niro and Jerry Zaks directed the first staging in 2016, with choreography by Sergio Trujillo. The songs run on doo-wop and early rock, the sound of the streets the story remembers.

The tone stays warm even when the story turns hard. It is a memory piece, narrated by the grown man looking back, so the comedy and the dread sit side by side: a stoop full of wisecracking regulars one minute, a car with the wrong people in it the next. What lingers is how ordinary the pressure feels.

It speaks to anyone who has had two people pulling them in opposite directions and been forced to choose. The question underneath, whether a wasted talent is the saddest thing there is, lands harder sung out loud than it ever does on a page.