Theatre in Review: A Bronx Tale (Longacre Theatre)It's not often that the opening number of a musical is interrupted by a brutal slaying, but that's what happens in A Bronx Tale. The cast is busily putting over "Belmont Avenue," a lively, kickily choreographed (by Sergio Trujillo) sequence, with smartly turned lyrics and an alluring doo-wop undertone, about life in an Italian neighborhood in the borough of the title, circa 1960. The music swings, a quartet of towers (designed by Beowulf Boritt) rolls into place to create a city streetscape, and gangs of guys and girls dance flirtily as pedestrians and pushcart peddlers come and go. Just as we're gearing up for a good time, a fight breaks out between two men, and another member of the company -- tall, imposing, nattily turned -- out in a well-tailored suit -- produces a gun and plugs one of the combatants full of lead. The number resumes, in a much lower-key manner. It's a daring gambit, a hand-on-heart promise that the show we're seeing will be more complicated than usual, more engaged with real-world matters and adult emotions. Despite a lot of good work, however, A Bronx Tale doesn't really deliver on that promise; what might have been a gut-punch melodrama ends up a half-hearted musical bildungsroman -- one that, for all its infusions of local color -- is surprisingly antiseptic. The killer is Sonny, who may not be the protagonist of A Bronx Tale but who certainly casts the longest shadow in it. Chazz Palminteri's book, based on his autobiographical solo show, is the story of growing up in a community where nice Catholic families daily rub shoulders with made men; right after the killing mentioned above, one of the locals instantly grabs the gun out of Sonny's hand and disposes of it before the cops arrive. Nine-year-old Calogero witnesses the entire bloody incident; urged by his parents to deny everything, he instead agrees to review a group of suspects in a police lineup. But the boy is wised-up beyond his years; standing directly in front of Sonny, he declines to finger him. The grateful Sonny offers Calogero his protection, and, renaming him "C", becomes a kind of father figure to him. This arrangement generates plenty of tension at home, because C already has a father, Lorenzo, a law-abiding bus driver who has his own past with Sonny and doesn't want his only child to grow up mobbed up. Lorenzo and his wife, Rosina, suddenly find themselves confronted with the kind of parenting problems Dr. Spock never taught them how to deal with. For example, there's the little matter of the $1,200 that Lorenzo finds hidden in C's bedroom, which the boy earned throwing dice for Sonny. Lorenzo orders his son to return the money -- the first of many wedges that will be driven between the formerly loving father and son. It's a complicated, and potentially powerful, triangle -- a young boy growing up torn between two starkly different philosophies of life -- but Palminteri's book only roughs it in, and the often tuneful and literate songs, by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, don't dig deeply enough under the story's surface to reach the primal emotions underneath. The basic ideas are there: "Roll 'Em," this show's version of "Luck Be a Lady," amusingly details how C gets drawn into Sonny's world, via the local craps game; "Nicky Machiavelli" reveals that Sonny is well-read, using The Prince as an instruction manual for dealing with the seedy cast of characters who surround him. Indeed, Sonny introduces C to a world where no one can be trusted. ("It's always a friend that does the deed," he notes, without blinking -- the deed being assassination.) But, almost of necessity -- A Bronx Tale is meant to be seen through the eyes of the innocently adoring C -- Sonny remains a shadowy figure, with no past to speak of and an ill-defined criminal life; it's never really clear what he does all day, aside from standing around on street corners, gambling, and boozing it up in the local bar. Nick Cordero brings enormous presence and understated menace to the role; he also charms, turning Sinatra-suave when delivering "One of the Great Ones," which lays out Sonny's peculiar theory that each man only gets three great loves in one's life. But the heart of his character remains unexamined; we never learn how and why he chose a career that -- even he admits -- is doomed to end in a pool of blood. Still, Cordero is luckier than Richard H. Blake, who, as the square, honest-to-a fault working stiff, Lorenzo -- his driver uniform always pressed and his tie in place -- has little to do but strike disapproving poses as C's life becomes increasingly enmeshed with Sonny's. Blake has what is arguably the score's weakest number, "Look to Your Heart," a wan, Hallmark-style ode in which he urges the boy to follow his dreams. ("Just use your talent/And don't you dare waste it," he sings, as if he knows his nine-year-old will grow up to write a Broadway show.) The big revelation about Lorenzo is delivered by Rosina when he is offstage, and it leads to a dullish reprise of "Look to Your Heart." Because nether of C's role models is drawn in any depth, the question of whom to follow lacks urgency. This central situation gets kicked aside for much of Act II, when C falls in love with Jane, a black girl from a nearby neighborhood. (Interestingly, in this matter, it's Sonny who urges C to follow his heart; Lorenzo, insisting that he isn't prejudiced, tries to nip the romance in the bud. It's one of the script's neater complications.) This leads to a rush of events, many of them involving racial tensions, including a mini-rumble, an ugly exchange of epithets, and a misadventure, with Molotov cocktails, that provides C with an urgent wake-up call, followed by a shocking turn of events that deglamorizes Sonny for all time. A Bronx Tale should do good things for Bobby Conte Thornton, who, as the adolescent C, earnestly imitates Sonny's tough-guy stance, insinuatingly asks his father insulting questions, and leads his own budding gang of maladjusted adolescents; with his looks, presence, and singing voice, he is real leading-man material, and he presides over the action with natural authority. Ariana DeBose, late of the ensemble of Hamilton, is a bright beam of sunshine as Jane; she has a dazzling smile, a sassy way with a line, and a voice they can probably hear in the balcony of Falsettos, across the street. They team up for the score's most appealing number, "In a World Like That," which fully captures the rush of falling in love while simultaneously scandalizing your family and friends. As the nine-year-old C, Hudson Loverro brings down the house with "I Like It," in which the boy revels in the new-found status that Sonny's friendship confers on him, but I wish he sang better and enunciated more clearly. Boritt's set combines the previously mentioned towers -- each representing its own apartment block with a store on the ground floor -- with a variety of forced-perspective street scenes and river views, all of them washed in red, as if prophesying the bloodshed to come. Howell Binkley's lighting allows for seamless scenic transitions in addition to framing and pacing the musical numbers with his usual flair. Gareth Owen's sound design is on the loud side but eminently intelligible at all times; he also provides a knockout of an explosion effect. Interestingly, William Ivey Long's costumes don't chart much of a difference between the play's two time frames, in 1960 and '68, which may well be a statement about the insularity of C's community. The directors, Robert DeNiro and Jerry Zaks, have delivered a brisk, efficient production, which, nevertheless, lacks the flavor of life in this urban ethnic enclave; what could have had the detail and powerful moral pull of a Martin Scorsese film comes across as slick musical theatre that needs more heart and soul to deliver its story of a boy growing up at a profound moral crossroads. How is it that a show with murders, beatings, and a ghastly accident, not to mention furious confrontations, family secrets, and shocking betrayals, ultimately seems so weightless? --David Barbour 
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