“I made a deal with the devil,” he says of the controversial promoter, whose distinctive speaking style he mockingly imitates. But he says little about his time in jail, other than to recite a laundry list of the many celebrities who visited him there, including - in a mention that gets a big laugh as a photo of her beaming face is projected behind him - Florence Henderson.Īnother figure who receives a heaping dose of his vitriol is Don King.

Tyson delivers an impassioned denial of the rape charge for which he was convicted in 1992. PHOTOS: Spike Lee Bringing Mike Tyson’s One-Man Show to Broadway But despite his bitter insults directed toward both Givens and her mother, there’s otherwise little that’s revelatory other than his assertion that they continued to have sexual relations - he puts it rather more bluntly - even after they were separated. Unfortunately, it’s contrasted with his lengthy harangue about his former wife Robin Givens, including a comically detailed description of spotting her making out with Brad Pitt in a car during their divorce proceedings. Tyson’s account of his close relationship with the elderly, ornery trainer, while peppered with humor - “I thought he was a perv, or something,” he says about their first meeting - is one of the evening’s more moving elements. He wound up in the local juvenile detention center so often, he jokes, “It was like Cheers to me … everybody knew my name.”īut all that changed when he began to be mentored by the legendary Cus D’Amato, who immediately saw the strapping teenager’s potential and set him on a path to boxing greatness.

When the curtain rises, Tyson, dapperly dressed in a dark suit, is sitting pensively on a stool as we hear Nat “King” Cole croon “Nature Boy.”īut the mellowness doesn’t last for long, as he proceeds to deliver a frequently profane, sometimes draggy two-hour monologue, written by his wife Kiki, which is punctuated by film footage and photographs projected on a large screen.īoasting about his standing as the youngest heavyweight champion of all time while assuring us that he’s no longer the angry young man he used to be (“I don’t even want to get into an argument”), he begins with an account of his hardscrabble years growing up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he quickly established a reputation as a formidable brawler while getting into constant scrapes with the law. The atmosphere is set before the show begins, with the theater festooned with Brooklyn-centric banners and a DJ situated in a side box spinning classic records by the likes of Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. How to Watch the Tony Awards Nominations Livestream

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