West Side Story made us believe in ballet-dancing gangs. Les Misérables successfully musicalized the deadly Paris Uprising of 1832. Sweeney Todd even held onto its darkness through songs about pie. So, does Chazz Palminteri's autobiographical account of his 1960s Bronx upbringing translate to a world where mob bosses croon and locals pirouette through the neighborhood? Sometimes.

The appeal of A Bronx Tale — from its earliest days as Palminteri's one-man stage play through its famous 1993 screen adaptation — is the intimate look at a world responsible for shaping the family story that unfolds inside it. In a nutshell, that story revolves around young Calogero, who grows up torn between the influence of his hard-working father, Lorenzo (Richard H. Blake doing touching justice to Robert De Niro's sympathetic performance on film), and the local mob boss Sonny (an ever-reliable Nick Cordero as yet another towering bully with heart) who takes the boy under his tutelage.

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Source: http://www.theatermania.com/