Chazz Palminteri Prepping ‘A Bronx Tale’ For Foxwoods Stage

By John Voket

MASHANTUCKET — From his early days fronting a rock band to his big break as a writer and actor when he was discovered by Robert De Niro, Chazz Palminteri has enjoyed a successful quarter-century ride in the business that has seen his name up in lights for work on stage, television and in film.

The talented writer and performer is coming to Connecticut and returning to the stage to perform his successful Broadway play A Bronx Tale, at Fox Theater at Foxwoods Resort Casino November 19-21. Palminteri took a few minutes recently to chat with The Newtown Bee about his celebrated film and stage show, his efforts to promote more diverse Italian characters, as well as his education under directors from William Friedkin to Woody Allen to Harold Ramis.

Called a “gritty masterpiece” and “a riveting stage show,” A Bronx Tale will transform Fox Theater into a rough-and-tumble, ‘60s-era Bronx neighborhood under the direction of Tony Award Winning Jerry Zaks.

A Bronx Tale on stage gives Palminteri the opportunity to stretch his acting chops to their fullest as he breathes life into no less than 18 different characters, while showcasing his storytelling talents. The show and film draws heavily from Palminteri’s experiences with family relationships, racial barriers, overcoming societal pressures and some of the violence he witnessed firsthand growing up on the streets of New York. 

“When I was a young boy in the Bronx, I witnessed a man shoot another man right in front of me while I was sitting on my stoop,” Palminteri said in an advance. “At that time, I thought they were fighting over a parking space in front of my building. I never did find out what they were fighting over, but it doesn’t matter now anyway. But that incident was how A Bronx Tale began.”

The play follows Palminteri’s struggle with interracial dating in the tumultuous 1960s, and the racial barriers that exist for both Italians and African-Americans. Originating in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, the semi-autobiographical, one-man show caught the attention of Academy Award winning actor Robert De Niro, who offered to buy the story and make it into a feature length film. 

The film version premiered in 1993 under De Niro’s direction and starred both De Niro and Palminteri. 

During a phone conversation with The Bee during a ride between his Bedford, N.Y., home and the city, Palminteri admitted that he got his first taste of fame as a lead singer in a rock band called, appropriately, Razzamachazz.

“I was a singer for like, ten years before I got heavily into acting,” Palminteri said. “I always wanted to be an actor first, but my singing career took off first before I got heavily into acting. I was actually doing theater while I was doing music. I would go on the road with the band and then come back to do a play or something like that.”

Meaty Roles Beckoned

Palminteri said he never got into classic theater work like Shakespeare, but he did take on meaty roles in more contemporary dramas including playing the intense lead character Jerry in Edward Albee’s Zoo Story as a fledgling thespian.

Throughout his career, Palminteri found great success as both an actor and director focusing on character pieces and anthologies that feature a collection of actors and situations that may be directly, or indirectly tied together by a unified theme or incident.

“I find those interacting pieces a lot like life,” he said. It’s hard to make that kind of project work sometimes, but when it does it’s beautiful to watch.”

Such is the case with A Bronx Tale, which saw the De Niro character in the film inspired by Palminteri’s own father, himself a city bus driver — far from the conniving and hellbent operators that shared the streets and avenues of the actor’s Bronx childhood.

Besides a career-long relationship with Di Nero, Palminteri has been taken under the wing of numerous directors he has worked with, being brought from the sound stage into the editing room where performances are cut and shaped for the eventual viewing audiences.

“I learned the most, I think, from Bob [De Niro], Woody Allen and probably Bill Friedkin,” Palminteri said. “But it was Bob who was the first one to tell me it takes as much talent to recognize a great idea as it does to come up with it yourself. I never forgot that... it was very helpful in my career.”

For fans of the film, the shock of seeing Palminteri playing 18 different roles in just a couple of hours is tempered by Zaks who directs the actor with a “fluidity that makes [the play] better than the film.”

“If you loved the movie, you’ll love the play even more,” promised Palminteri. “It’s a very visceral experience. It reaches out and grabs you because I am the guy... I am Calogero. So here’s this guy telling you what happened by playing all the parts.”

Palminteri said he recalled a famous quote from Alfred Hitchcock who said there are only three things a film is good for — making the viewer laugh, cry or scared, and if you can do two of the three you have a good movie.

“In A Bronx Tale, I do all three,” he said. “It’s one of those things like lightning in a bottle. It just happened and I can’t explain it, but I’m very proud of it.”

Proud Of His Heritage

While his gravelly voice and rough physical features have created a ready-made tough guy type, which Palminteri has portrayed in many of his roles, A Bronx Tale on stage provides the opportunity for him to showcase the kind of diversity many other Italian-American character actors never get the chance to play.

In recognition of his real-life role in promoting the diverse talents of Italian-Americans over the past century Palminteri received the 1996 Leadership in Entertainment Award from the Coalition of Italo-American Association, Inc., and was honored by President Clinton with a Special Achievement Award for the Performing Arts from the National Italian American Foundation in Washington, DC.

In the 1998 A&E documentary Italians in America: The Journey Home, Palminteri also worked to break down the stigmas and type-casting that seemed to haunt many of his peers.

“I always felt people always talk about Italians in relation to the Mafia, and The Sopranos, but I wanted to write a movie about the working man,” he said. “The mafia is just one example of a much broader representation of the Italian–American community that is also made up of cops, firemen, restaurant owners, taxi drivers. Our nation was founded on the backs of these working people.

“When Lorenzo the bus driver tells his son, ‘Look, I’m the tough guy. It doesn’t take much work to pull a trigger,’ I’m really trying to honor the people who get up every day and go to work for a living. A Bronx Tale is really a dedication to them,” Palminteri said.

Tickets for A Bronx Tale are $43, $53 and $110 for Friday and Sunday shows, and $49, $59 and $110 for Saturday’s show. Remaining tickets can be reserved at www.foxwoods.com, by calling the Foxwoods box office at 800-200-2882, through TicketMaster, or in person at the Foxwoods Box Office.