Then, just as abruptly, it’s back to the jaunty narrative. Tyson set up these should-be-poignant moments they materialize without warning in the midst of the otherwise jaunty, lighthearted, profane narrative, and the audience is supposed to adopt instant somberness. Tyson tells us very little about: his mother, his sister and one of his children. There is a strident denial that he raped a Miss Black America contestant in 1991, a crime for which he served three years in prison.Īnd there are awkward efforts to wring sympathy out of the deaths of three people who Mr. Tyson had an out-of-the-ring altercation in 1988 and the boxing promoter Don King. Tyson trashes Robin Givens, his former wife Mitch Green, a boxer with whom Mr. There are overly long stretches in which Mr. Tyson’s initial winning of a championship in 1986, are skipped entirely. No one point is particularly higher or lower than any other, and some personal milestones, like Mr. Lee, who attached himself to the show after a version of it appeared in Las Vegas in April, has not brought to it the dramatic ebb and flow of his best movies.

Tyson has finally found a nondestructive way to exist in the world. But by the end of “Undisputed Truth” you may at least be willing to grant that it would be swell if Mr. Sure, we should save our accolades for the many people who have transcended difficult beginnings without abusing drugs, racking up a rape conviction and biting off a piece of another guy’s ear. Yet that incongruous, almost childlike Tyson charm pokes through occasionally and makes you momentarily forget how ham-handed and manipulative the show is. Tyson, 46, is doing little more than relating his well-publicized life story, and, under Spike Lee’s direction, he’s doing so with a clumsiness startling to see on a Broadway stage (and at a ticket price that tops out at $199). 12, is among the odder spectacles Broadway has seen in a while. He’s Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight boxing champion, and his one-man show, “Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth,” which opened Thursday for a run through Aug. The guy doing just such a spin job on the stage there could punch you back in a way that your face would not soon forget. If so, you might want to stay away from the Longacre Theater.

Perhaps you are among the millions of Americans who have muttered, “If I hear one more aging celebrity trying to make a buck by spinning his youthful debaucheries and misdeeds into a redemption story, I’m going to bust him in the nose.”

Tyson undisputed truth