Hollywood actor Chazz Palminteri's real-life mob story a musical at RBTL's Auditorium

A wiseguy walks into a bakery. He’s a tall drink of water, dressed in black and wearing dark shades on a gray day. He shakes hands all around, talks a bit, fills a few cannolis. Then, he's out the door in search of a slice.   

It seems like something else should have happened, maybe words tossed around like knives or cookie trays sent skittering across the tile floor of Savoia Pastry Shoppe in Rochester. But this is real life, and the wiseguy clothing actually masks a nice guy, Hollywood actor Chazz Palminteri, visiting Rochester to promote his musical, A Bronx Tale, which runs Oct. 14-21 at Rochester Broadway Theatre League's Auditorium Theatre.

The story began as a one-man play in Los Angeles and New York before becoming a film in 1993 with Palminteri playing the wiseguy and Robert DeNiro directing and playing the nice guy, Palminteri’s father, Lorenzo.

The story stems from a murder that Palminteri, whose first name is Calogero, actually witnessed at age 9 while sitting on the front steps of his Bronx apartment building in 1961. A real wiseguy, named Sonny in the retelling of the story, was an Italian boss in the neighborhood who one day shot a man on the street in broad daylight for what looked to young Calogero like a dispute over a parking space.

Recounting the incident, Palminteri displays his quintessential look: eyes narrowed, head down, sideways glance of his dark eyes and an intense, slightly menacing gaze.

“I didn’t rat on the guy,” he says. “I saw him and he saw me. But I didn’t rat on him. It was ingrained in me — you don’t rat.”

A moment later, he smiles big when talking about his old neighborhood at 187th Street and Belmont. (Ironically, 187 is a common abbreviation for homicide, which was made popular by Hollywood cop shows that drew on the California penal code.)

 “I still go there once a month to shop,” Palminteri says, rattling off the names of the stores still operating in his old neighborhood like Borgatti’s pasta shop and Gino’s, where cannolis reign. “It’s like it’s still old times. They say, ‘Hey, Calogero.’ ”

The story tracks Palminteri’s life after witnessing the murder, though for dramatic reasons he compressed some events and exaggerated others. The police lineup of the neighborhood wiseguys didn’t happen (the police actually questioned the boy in his home), but the story accurately reflects how Palminteri’s life was complicated by the murder. A grateful Sonny tried to make the boy his protégé, but Palminteri’s father, played by Robert DeNiro in the film, pulled him back from the wiseguy life.

Wasn’t witnessing a murder traumatic?

“Sure, I always remembered it,” Palminteri says, then pauses to add that it didn’t drive him to stay indoors. “I don’t know what that says about me,” he adds, laughing. “In my neighborhood, anything could happen. It made me street smart.” Of Sonny, he says that “I was his kid, I was his guy. When you have the ears of the emperor, no one bothers you.”

Sonny encouraged Palminteri to go to college rather than be drawn into the seedy life, but Palminteri’s father worried that Sonny’s power and wealth could nevertheless be intoxicating. Palminteri credits his late parents, Lorenzo and Rose, for keeping him on the right path.

Sometimes his father, a city bus driver, would pass by on his route and Palminteri would hear the bus horn and look up to see his father pointing at him to get inside. In one of the more dramatic moments in A Bronx Tale, his father delivers a poignant speech about how it takes toughness to get up and go to work every day, and not much strength to pull a trigger, as Sonny did. Palminteri never forgot it.

Palminteri was motivated to write the story while he was a struggling actor. If Hollywood wouldn’t cast him in a big role, he’d just write it himself. And he did. He performed it as a one-act play in Los Angeles, where Robert DeNiro saw it and offered to make it into a film.

Palminteri had had offers before — as much as $1 million for the rights — but turned them down because potential buyers wouldn’t agree to let him write the screenplay and play the role of Sonny. DeNiro agreed to both conditions and directed the 1993 film and also played Palminteri’s father, Lorenzo, the honest, hardworking city bus driver.

“I always believed I was born to do this,” Palminteri says of show business. “I had no fallback plan. My parents gave me full confidence.” They also helped him out financially when, in his 20s, Palminteri lived for a time in the apartment below his parents and sometimes would slip a note under the door to ask for $20 to help him get by as he struggled to make it as an actor.

He remembered that his father once gave him a card that said “the saddest thing in life is wasted talent.” This message motivated Palminteri, who carries replicas of the card in his wallet.

“My father used to tell people that he was the original Lorenzo,”  Palminteri recalls. “My mother was still mad at me at 97 years old because her part wasn’t bigger.”

Palminteri brought them with him to the 1995 Oscars after being nominated for best supporting actor in Bullets Over Broadway. In the limousine, his father handed him an envelope, which turned out to contain all the cards he’d written asking for $20. “We figured we would save them because we knew you would make it,” his father said.

What could possibly be left for A Bronx Tale, already a play, film and now a musical? Palminteri says Jay Leno had a suggestion: “Maybe you could make it a western next.” Palminteri laughs. “I don’t know if that will work.”

Sandra Parker is a former writer for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and Santa Monica Outlook who now lives in Pittsford.

If You Go:

What: A Bronx Tale — The Musical.

Where: Auditorium Theatre, 885 E. Main St., Rochester.

When: Sunday, Oct. 14, through Sunday, Oct. 21.

Tickets: starting at $38, available at Ticketmaster.com, (800) 745-3000 and the Box Office. For more, call (585) 277-3325. 

RBTL season full of variety

•Les Misérables, the mega-hit musical opera, will play Nov. 20-24. The Tony Award-winning musical, based on the novel by Victor Hugo,  is a season special and not part of RBTL’s subscription series.

• The second show of the subscription season, playing Dec. 11 to 16, 2018, is Fiddler on the Roof. It features the Broadway classics “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Sunrise, Sunset” and  “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.”

• Next, Chicago will play Feb. 5-10, 2019. It's the classic tale of fame, fortune and all that jazz.

•Miss Saigon takes the stage March 5 to10, 2019. It tells the tale of the last days of the Vietnam War, where 17-year-old Kim is forced to work in a bar run by a notorious character known as the Engineer. There she meets and falls in love with an American G.I. named Chris, amid the fall of Saigon.

•Hamilton arrives next, April 23 to May 12, 2019. It's the story of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from the West Indies who became George Washington's right-hand man during the Revolutionary War and was the new nation’s first Treasury secretary. Featuring a score that blends hip-hop, jazz, blues, rap, R&B and Broadway music, Hamilton is the story of America then, as told by America now.

• The sixth and final show of the season is Waitress, playing June 4 to 9, 2019. Created by an all-female team, it tells the story of Jenna, a waitress and expert pie maker, who dreams of a way out of her small town and loveless marriage.

For more information, call (585) 222-5000 or go to rbtl.org.