Newsday

Barbara
Schuler

November 15, 2017

Yo, John, who you callin’ a moron? Apparently, that would be me — and everyone else who sees “Latin History for Morons,” John Leguizamo’s new play now on Broadway after a March run at the Public Theater. And that’s the kind of tough talk you get over the 100 frenetic minutes he tries to fill in blanks that textbooks have left about his culture’s contributions to American history. It’s an impossible task, but he gives it his best shot, in an effort to help his eighth-grade son complete a middle school graduation project. Playing a manic professor, Leguizamo goes from the Aztecs and Incas to Sonia Sotomayor and Pitbull searching for someone his son can label a Latin hero.

Access Atlanta

David
Canfield

November 15, 2017

In August, a few months after John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons premiered Off-Broadway, a white nationalist rally was held in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. The protest prompted a debate over how we as a country should remember our founding: the lingering stain of the Confederacy in the South, the legacy of controversial icons like Christopher Columbus, the ways in which we choose to address the sins of the past. It reignited a conversation about who our “history” — as it’s taught, considered, and selected — really belongs to. There couldn’t be a better time, in other words, for Latin History for Morons to get a Broadway upgrade. Leguizamo’s one-man show features the performer as a version of himself, revising the way American history is typically taught to elevate the heroes of his own ethnic background, and to give his son the chance to feel pride in where and what he comes from. Leguizamo, who was born in Colombia, has long been a wild stage presence, an actor of enough range to keep an entire theater enraptured through his own musings, impressions, and literal pratfalls. (Previous one-man shows have netted him Obie and Drama Desk awards.) Yet while Latin History doesn’t exactly depart from that script — Leguizamo is hardly subdued here — this production is a sobering expression of political urgency that reflects its star’s maturation as a Latino public figure.

Jesse
Green

November 15, 2017

Like the best mimics, John Leguizamo administers large but precisely calibrated doses of exaggeration to make his impersonations pop. In “Latin History for Morons,” a panoptic survey of two millenniums of oppression in the Americas, he tosses off dozens of quick character sketches that feel exactly as true as they are likely inaccurate.

I rather doubt, for instance, that his prissy, nail-filing Moctezuma has any basis in fact. But who cares whether the Aztec emperor really lisped at Cortés, “You leave me no choice ’cause you’re so butch”? What matters is that the laughs are real, in this case suggesting familiarity with the accommodations that proud people make to an overwhelming force.

And so it is with almost every character brought to life in Mr. Leguizamo’s long and often hilarious parade of injustice, stretching from Peru under the Inca to Texas under Trump. At their best, his jokes get at something deep, whether he is serving up a Rat Pack Christopher Columbus, a French poodle de Tocqueville, a sassy, cross-dressing Cuban-American Civil War soldier or a deaf uncle with an idiosyncratic way of signing.

Jeremy
Gerard

November 15, 2017

Beginning with Mambo Mouth, the 1990 solo show at The American Place Theatre that marked his debut with the quiet subtlety of a cherry bomb in a trash can, John Leguizamo has filled his down-time between movies (the Ice Age franchise; Summer of Sam) with some of the most deceptively funny riffs on matters of consequence ever to be called comedy. An incomparable mimic, his subjects include growing up Latino in Jackson Heights, Queens; being type-cast as a pimp, drug dealer, skirt chaser (or, more typically, all three at the same time); his family, your family, my family. No one is safe. (Full disclosure: Leguizamo wrote the introduction to Wynn Place Show, my book about The American Place Theatre. No money changed hands, I’ve never socialized with him and I’m still not safe…)

Matt
Windman

November 15, 2017

“We’ve got a lot of work to do here and very little time,” warns actor, comedian and “self-professed ghetto scholar” John Leguizamo at the top of his high-energy and impassioned — but also bulky and disjointed — one-man show “Latin History for Morons,” which has transferred to Broadway following a short run earlier this year Off-Broadway at the Public Theater. Leguizamo (whose numerous film credits range from “Ice Age” to “Moulin Rouge!”) is equally well-known for his freewheeling stage monologues, in which he infuses stand-up comedy with tales of his coming-of-age, extended family and Hispanic background, including plays such as “Mambo Mouth,” “Freak” and “Ghetto Klown,” many of which have been filmed for television.