By Tom Deignan

Bobby Spillane grew up in the West Side Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, once one of the most heavily Irish districts in all of New York.

It is still home to the McManus Democratic club on West 44th Street. Spillane himself is a member of the famously political McManus clan, by way of his mother. 

Spillane’s father, meanwhile, was a neighborhood legend who was killed when Spillane was just 12 years old. When the Irish mob movie Road to Perdition came out, Bobby wrote a haunting remembrance of his father for the New York Daily News. The front-page article was headlined “My Dad, the Last Gentleman Gangster.”

Needless to say, the West Side has changed a lot in recent years. Even the neighborhood name of Hell’s Kitchen is long out of fashion, replaced (mostly by real estate types) with much more generic names like Chelsea or Clinton.

Spillane, for example, recalled in a recent interview that a new neighborhood Starbuck’s was once a methadone clinic.

Either way, the McManuses (known collectively as the McMani) and some of the Spillanes are still there.

In fact, Spillane has spent recent weeks inside the McManus political club rehearsing a new play of his called All Dolled Up. He has also sold a movie script to Adam Sandler’s movie company called Irish Curse. The script was co-written with former Saturday Night Live star and Brooklyn native Colin Quinn.

Quinn, incidentally, is also one of the producers of All Dolled Up, which is being staged through April 30 at the Producers Club on Ninth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets.

The West Side Irish neighborhood of Spillane’s youth always seems to find its way into his writing.

“If you want to mess a kid up sexually,” Spillane said with a laugh, ‘send him to Catholic school right around Times Square.”

Back then, of course, Times Square was the most erotically-charged strip in the entire world.

Spillane adds that a lot of the characters in his new play come from childhood memories. All Dolled Up can best be described as an only-in-New York story.

“It’s about a cross-dressing mobster,” Spillane deadpans, when asked what his new play is all about.

As odd as that premise may seem, however, Spillane said the inspiration did, in fact, come from a true life mobster he read about, who ran “on the fringes of the Gotti crew.”

All Dolled Up takes place in the late 1960s in the West Village, against the backdrop of the famous Stonewall Riots. The Stonewall Inn was a bar owned by mobsters and one of the most prominent gay clubs in the city. 

Mobsters often ran such places because, though they were disreputable, they also could be highly profitable. When regulars were fed up with being harassed, they started what came to be called the Stonewall rebellion, which many cite as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.

Anyway, in Spillane’s play, an Italian American mobster from Brooklyn starts hanging around the West Village, a neighborhood slightly different than his home turf of Bensonhurst.

“It all makes for a lot of laughs,” said Spillane. “You have to keep it wild.”

Eventually, though, Spillane’s character has to make some tough choices about his old pals and his lifestyle.

Among the stars of All Dolled Up is retired NYPD Lieutenant John O’Donahue, whose credits include a three-year run on NYPD Blue.

You can’t talk to a lifelong West Sider like Spillane — whose family knows a thing or two about political maneuvering in the neighborhood — without asking what he thinks about the proposed West Side stadium project supported by Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the New York Jets.

“You know, people talk about how bad the old days were and how there were backroom deals and things done under the table,” Spillane said. 

“But at least things got done. They’re going to debate this thing for the next five years.”

Personally, Spillane supports the stadium, “as long as they give something back to the community,” he adds.

Spillane does miss the old days when Hell’s Kitchen was a tougher neighborhood.

“I miss certain things. I remember when the Producer’s Club was a pool hall,” he says.

But Spillane is also realistic. “It is a lot safer these days,” he feels.

True. But, from time to time, you can still come across a cross-dressing mobsters in Hell’s Kitchen.

Call 212-868-4444 for information about All Dolled Up. 

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)