GALLO SUPERB IN `KING OF THE CITY'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Two-bit punk in a pinstriped suit? Or all-American anti-hero?

You may have difficulty deciding, after watching Robert Gallo in his blisteringly believable one-man show, ``King of the City: An Evening With Al Capone.''

In this feisty revival at NoHo's Bitter Truth and Sweet Lies Theatre, Gallo once again makes the notorious Chicago gangster come all too credibly to life.

Whether the play, co-written by Gallo and director Juanin Clay, persuades us that Capone was no better or worse than any other flimflam artist of the Depression era is another, and in this case less interesting, question.

With his blunt rationalizations and bare-knuckled intelligence, Gallo's Capone could have stepped out of a David Mamet play. At heart, he tells us, he's just a hardworking stiff, a businessman out to make a buck off the American Dream.

``I give the public what the public wants,'' he tells us in his whiskey baritone, in a beyond-the-grave attempt to set the record straight.

There's also a Mamet-like jocularity in Gallo's combustive characterization, which is as entertaining as it is frighteningly convincing.

Built like a Windy City fireplug, a stogie in his gap-toothed mouth and a big, fat diamond on his finger, Gallo's Capone greets us in a purgatorial office graced with portraits of Lincoln and Washington. The pictures aren't meant ironically. ``In America,'' young Alphonse grew up believing, ``you can be anything you want.''

Through flashbacks, Capone tours us through his turn-of-the-century childhood, when he stole fruit from Brooklyn street vendors, to his graduation into petty thuggery, bootlegging and prostitution. Using only his blustery talents, Gallo calls forth an imaginary world of crooked cops, fawning reporters and jealous mob bosses.

Although ``King of the City'' proceeds more or less chronologically, it doesn't always take the shortest distance between two points. David Billotti's jump-cut lighting is meant to signal Capone's movement between past and present. But the device is used so haphazardly that the narrative frequently steps on its own toes. When a hailstorm of tape-recorded tommy guns and rear-screen projections of newspaper headlines announces the St. Valentine's Day massacre - the evening's dramatic high-water mark - the frenetic staging blurs the details about Capone's involvement.

``King of the City'' employs an additional framing device of having Capone relate his life story to an unseen female reporter. This allows Gallo to ooze oily charm, but adds little in the way of psychological subtext.

Ultimately, ``King of the City'' too easily accepts its view of Citizen Al as a pugilistic populist whose brutal ``justice'' was preferable to that of the hypocrites around him. Though this spin is presented as revisionism, it actually echoes Capone's own self-serving myth-making.

Al Capone, of all people, hardly needs to be admirable to be intriguing - as Gallo's fitfully brilliant, shadow-boxing performance proves in spades.

THE FACTS

What: ``King of the City: An Evening With Al Capone.''

Where: Bitter Truth and Sweet Lies Theatre, 11050 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; through February.

Tickets: $10. For reservations, call [phone].

Our rating: Three Stars.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Robert Gallo stars in ``King of the City: An Evening With Al Capone'' at the Bitter Truth and Sweet Lies Theatre in North Hollywood.