John Leguizamo provides a hilarious syllabus in off-Broadway’s ‘Latin History for Morons’
NEW YORK: The only misgiving you’ll harbour about John Leguizamo’s foray into comic academia is that you can’t enroll for a whole semester.
Nope, sorry, “Latin History for Morons,” which had its official opening on Monday night at off-Broadway’s Public Theatre, is a seminar you only get to sit through once - unless of course, you’re of a mind to shell out for a second session. And you know, you might just want to, because the wit and wisdom of Leguizamo, sprinkled over such diverse topics as how the Aztecs were vanquished by the conquistadors and why Leguizamo’s teenage son and daughter find him totally mortifying, have the kind of buoyant payoffs that would easily justify retaking the class.
If you’ve seen any of Leguizamo’s other solo shows, like his breakthrough “Freak,” which went in 1998 from Broadway to an HBO movie version directed by Spike Lee, you know that he’s an accomplished mimic and raconteur, one capable of both rawness and urbanity. Much of his material is derived, in classic stand-up mould, from his own childhood and culture, those being predominantly New York Latino; his heritage is Colombian, Puerto Rican and Lebanese.
Inspired, he tells us, by his efforts to counter some of the negative stereotypes of Latinos in America, and pass on a bit of ethnic pride to his children, “Latin History for Morons,” expertly directed by Tony Taccone, is Leguizamo’s partly tongue-in- cheek attempt to point out what Latin America and its antecedents have given to the world. (Chocolate, calendars and the tango are some of the items on his list.) His son, as part of a year-long middle school project, has to select a hero to report on, and overbearing dad Leguizamo retraces the steps of his thoroughly ham-handed assistance in guiding his son to an appropriate subject from the library.
It’s a mission the comedianactor relates with enormous warmth and humour - including the bawdy kind. He’s still the electric stage presence he always was, although parenthood, a lengthy marriage and middle age seem to have mellowed him agreeably; when he tries to rise from the floor after a physical bit and mentions that he’s getting to old for this kind of stuff, the complaint seems to come from someplace exceedingly real. At other times, on the pleasantly rudimentary set by Rachel Hauck stacked with books, Leguizamo stands before a blackboard to deliver a hilariously fractured lecture on a civilisation in the Americas that predated the European conquerors and settlers. The approach to the past sort of recalls the way history was re- enacted in “Peabody’s Improbable History,” a TV cartoon of the late 1950s and early ‘60s in which a dog, Mr Peabody, and his human son traveled back in time. On the evidence of “Latin History for Morons,” Leguizamo remains an endearingly animated figure himself. — WP Bloomberg