The New York Times
with Charles Isherwood reviewing is Very Positive:
"Mr. Palminteri’s stage memoir, a semi-autobiographical account of growing up under the loving protection of an Italian-American crime kingpin, had its debut in Los Angeles in 1989 and was later produced Off Broadway. In 1993 it became a movie directed by Robert De Niro, with a full cast including Mr. De Niro and Joe Pesci. Mr. Palminteri took the role of the big boss, Sonny.
He has subsequently appeared in dozens of Hollywood films, perhaps most memorably in Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway,” for which he received an Oscar nomination. But Mr. Palminteri left a sliver of his heart back in the Bronx, specifically on the corner of Belmont Avenue and 187th Street, the intersection where it all began. That’s where we find him as the lights rise again on “A Bronx Tale,” which retains sufficient heart, spice and humor nearly 20 years after its debut."
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"Mr. Palminteri is now 55, an age at which you might think it would be hard to muster the energy to play more than a dozen characters in the course of 90 minutes, not to mention the innocence to play a 9-year-old boy caught between the rigid moral vision of an upright, bus-driving father and the canny wisdom of a powerful capo.
But while Mr. Palminteri’s expressive, fleshy face bears more than a few traces of the passing years, he is in trim, energetic shape. As he strides across the stage with a lively gait, nimbly sliding from one role to another, he exudes a moment-to-moment engagement that suggests that this revival is not a lazy ego trip but a rejuvenating act of faith in the complementary powers of acting and storytelling."
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"“A Bronx Tale” loses some of its narrative momentum after a confrontation between Sonny and Lorenzo. The second half of the show, in which our hero discovers the charms of the female sex, and the limits of his father’s uprightness, is more scattered and less compelling, although Mr. Palminteri and his director, the veteran Jerry Zaks, never allow the energy level to flag for long."
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"“A Bronx Tale” may not possess the emotional breadth or sophistication of “The Sopranos.” But, appealingly, it lacks that show’s brutality too. I was always a bit revolted by the clinical realism of the bloodletting in “The Sopranos,” which made me feel soiled for taking a sympathetic interest in the personal foibles of the men perpetrating it. Mr. Palminteri may present his childhood hero through the worshipful eyes of youth, but even the nicest mobsters can benefit from a little fairy-tale airbrushing here and there."
http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/theater/reviews/26bron.html
"Y'know, I think Bertolt Brecht was rolling in his grave."
-Nellie McKay on the 2006 Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, in which she played Polly Peachum
