“Don’t worry,” Mike Tyson told us, “you’ll leave with two ears tonight, I promise.”
Which is more than Evander Holyfield got, but at least he wasn’t in the audience Tuesday night for “Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth” — unlike 50 Cent, Kanye West, Bryant Gumbel and some other fans.
Directed by Spike Lee, the show’s playing Broadway after premiering in Las Vegas, where he had an onstage band and wore a white cocktail jacket and black slacks. (“I’m really an animal, guys, I’m just dressed up nice,” he said on the Strip.)
Here, the former heavyweight champ’s alone onstage for two intermissionless hours. He gives us about five seconds of shadow-boxing, and spends the rest of the time strolling down memory lane with the help of a screenful of stills and videos.
The one-man show is mostly about personal bouts, like the charges — “I did not rape Desiree Washington,” he proclaims, again — that landed him in prison. Imagine his surprise, he tells us, when one of his celebrity visitors in jail was none other than “Brady Bunch” mom Florence Henderson. (A big photo of her got a huge laugh from the audience.) Another unexpected bonus, he says, was his discovery of Islam.
Tyson also talks about his other demons, starting with Robin Givens, whom he married in 1988 and split from a year later.
During their divorce proceedings, he spotted her in a car with Brad Pitt, whom she had dated before. Tyson quips that they look “like Robert Redford and Pearl Bailey.”
“The dynamic conniving duo,” he calls them in his signature mumbling, high-pitched monotone, which is tough to follow.
Maybe because “Undisputed Truth” is penned by Tyson’s current (third) wife, Kiki, what we’ve got here is a show about redemption, delivered in the contrite tones of a former bad boy turned family man and vegan.
The curtain goes up on the 46-year-old boxer sitting center stage in a gray suit and pale pink shirt, listening to Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” — “There was a boy/A very enchanted boy/A little shy and sad of eye/But very wise was he.”
Wisdom isn’t one of Tyson’s strong suits, but at least he explains why he grew up sad in Brooklyn.
“I was born with the addictive gene,” he says of his mother’s love affair with the bottle.
Just as Tyson seemed headed to a life of small-time crime, he’s rescued by trainer/manager Cus D’Amato.
“Are you scared of white people?” D’Amato asked his protégé. A slide of Mitt Romney pops up.
That’s the show’s first hour in a nutshell: funny, cheeky, fast, with room for some teary sentiment. “She died of cancer,” Tyson says of his mother, “but I really think that she died of a broken heart.”
And then things start to drag as Tyson trots out one foe after another, including boxer Mitch Green, with whom he butted heads in Harlem back in 1988.
“Then I made a pact with the devil,” Tyson announces. Cue photo of a wild-haired Don King.
And the ear-chomping? That one’s dispatched pretty fast. We don’t get the details, but there’s a still photo from the fight showing Tyson getting perilously close to Holyfield’s head. Tyson never tells us what was going through his mind at the time, but says the two have since made up.
By this point, Tyson’s pink shirt’s soaked through, and he’s pretty much out of breath. Not exactly a TKO. But at least he finished on his feet.