Alan Menken, Chazz Palminteri discuss ‘Bronx Tale’ collaboration as show hits Charlotte

Alan Irwin Menken and Calogero Lorenzo Palminteri grew up music-loving New York City boys, separated by exactly four years, 11 miles and one murder.

Palminteri witnessed that killing on Belmont Avenue in the Bronx. He kept his mouth shut when the cops asked if the neighborhood boss shot a guy to break up a fight, and that decision has paid off for more than half a century – not in currency, because the wise-guy life soon lost its allure, but in drama.

He turned the story of his youth into “A Bronx Tale,” a one-man show off-Broadway 30 years ago that established him as an actor to watch. Robert De Niro saw it and agreed to direct the 1993 film, with Palminteri — now Chazz — as charismatic gangster Sonny and De Niro as Lorenzo, the boy’s straight-arrow dad. (Calogero, pronounced “Ca-LO-jeh-roh,” is the Italian equivalent of Charles, which shortens to Chazz.)

Meanwhile, Menken had won Oscars for “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin.” Their paths crossed when he wrote the score for “Noel,” Palminteri’s feature film directing debut, in 2004. They talked doo-wop and Bobby Darin, Motown and mob music, the Bronx and Manhattan (and maybe a little New Rochelle, where Menken went to high school).

Menken had toyed with ’60s music from “Little Shop of Horrors” to “Sister Act,” but he’d never written a full-blown score reflecting his youth. He and Palminteri mulled the idea of “A Bronx Tale: The Musical,” and it went to Broadway under the direction of De Niro and four-time Tony-winner Jerry Zaks — but not until 2016. The touring version reaches Belk Theater April 16 in the Broadway Lights series.

Musicals do take a long time to gestate. But a dozen years?

“I was working on other projects, and I wasn’t sure what vocabulary I would use to tell this story,” says Menken, who builds shows from scratch. (Unlike most Broadway composers, he says he has no backlog of “trunk songs” awaiting use.) “To be bluntly honest, I knew Chazz would want to write the book, and he’d never written a Broadway musical. How would that work?

“Also, there was no team involved. But (the producing company) The Dodgers, whom I’ve known for decades, got involved. Tommy Mottola, whom I respect, was a producer. Robert De Niro was going to direct. I took the first meeting with (choreographer) Sergio Trujillo, whom I knew from ‘Leap of Faith,’ and we had a real foundation of Broadway talent.”

Palminteri did indeed want to write the book. He had done the drama on Broadway in 2007, playing 18 characters – he took it on tour again last year – and has never licensed a U.S. performance by another actor: “When I’m gone, somebody else will do it, but not now.”

Though he got an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor in Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway” and played customs agent Dave Kujan in “The Usual Suspects,” he’s inextricably bound to “Bronx Tale.”

He used his long-past experience as a singer to take over the role of Sonny near the end of the musical’s New York run. There’s even an entrée at his Manhattan eatery, Chazz Palminteri’s Italian Restaurant, called A Bronx Tail: Lobster, clams, mussels and shrimp, sautéed in a light spicy tomato sauce over homemade fettuccine for $49.95.

After so many iterations, you’d think fact and fable must have blended in his brain at age 66. He has no trouble keeping them straight, he says, because this tale is his life.

“All those things in the movie happened,” he says. “I squeezed them into a shorter time period, and there were small differences. There was never a lineup: I put that in to bond Calogero and Sonny. But the cops did come to my house to interview me, I dated a black girl from another part of the Bronx, I used throw dice with the white guys.

“There are all these moments where, if something goes a different way, the whole story changes. I get out of the car (full of Molotov cocktails to be thrown at a black neighborhood), and I’m here. I don’t, and there’s no ‘Bronx Tale.’ “

Did he have trouble letting others take the reins of so personal a project?

“I had an immense collaboration with Alan Menken and (lyricist) Glenn Slater. Glenn used some of my words and would never write something he didn’t think was real. Alan’s a genius, one of only two people I have seen – Billy Joel is the other — who can write a great song but throw it out because it doesn’t fit. Alan and Glenn always bounced things off me and asked ‘Does this feel right?’ ”

Menken confirms Joel took a crack at ‘Bronx Tale’ before giving up the task: “He would have done a fantastic job, but writing for musical theater is its own art form, the perfect form for me. It’s so collaborative, and each score has its own distinctive flavor specific to the characters. I feel bad for songwriters who are confined to write material (entirely) from their own perceptions. Musical theater gives you so much more to pull from.”

Menken’s projects usually have corrupters who seem helpful at first, starting with carnivorous plant Audrey in “Little Shop.” From Ursula in “Mermaid” and Jafar in “Aladdin” to the con man-evangelist in “Leap of Faith,” they’re sinister/sleazy yet seductive. “That’s basic to the structure of musicals,” he believes. “You have an everyday central character with a big journey to go on and an obstacle that stands in the way. Often, that obstacle is both external and internal.”

Yet Palminteri thinks there’s another reason that audiences – including those who’ve seen the one-man show in French, Japanese and Chinese – have taken to this narrative for 30 years.

“A story like ‘Goodfellas’ is more of a black-and-white issue,” he says. “My story is gray-and-gray. It’s not about finding a hero. Sonny said the same things my father did: Get out of the neighborhood. Don’t waste yourself. Do something that matters.’ I took the best of both of them and became a man.”

Want to go?

“A Bronx Tale: The Musical”

When: April 16-21 at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday.

Where: Belk Theater, 130 N. Tryon St.

Tickets: $25-$109.50.

Details: 704-372-1000 or blumenthalarts.org.

This story is part of an Observer underwriting project with the Thrive Campaign for the Arts, supporting arts journalism in Charlotte.