Word: mambo
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...Desi Arnaz music video and album are out, featuring his performances on I Love Lucy. The Mambo Kings, featuring a Desi Arnaz character, is coming to the theaters. Look for a boom in bongo sales...
...these cutting Hispanic stereotypes are the inventions of a writer- comedian-actor who is, perhaps surprisingly, Hispanic himself. They are characters in the play Mambo Mouth, a one-man tour de force created and performed by Colombian-born John Leguizamo, 27. Kaleidoscopic, hilarious and politically very incorrect, Mambo Mouth had a successful 35-week run off- Broadway earlier this year and won a 1991 Obie and Outer Critics Circle Award. Now a one-hour TV special based on the show will get the first of six airings on HBO this Saturday...
...seven sketches in Mambo Mouth (Leguizamo makes the transition from one to another by frenetically changing costumes behind a backlit scrim while loudspeakers pump out a salsa beat) grew from improvisations that Leguizamo based on his family and friends and on images culled from TV and films. "I drew on everything that was around me and put it together," he says. "I can only write something that touches me and amuses me, that I feel something about...
...material is a little too close to home for many Hispanics, who charge that Mambo Mouth perpetuates negative, sexist stereotypes. A female columnist in the Village Voice accused Leguizamo of promoting "refried machismo" and "woman bashing." The actor rejects the charge. "To some Latin people, we're not allowed to mock ourselves," he says. "I'm supposed to be doing the Bill Cosby-Brady Bunch syndrome." Leguizamo acknowledges, however, that his unflinching portrayals of Latin lowlifes, louts and losers can trigger a painful catharsis. "Latin culture is very subliminal. There's still a lot of self-hate. It's underneath...
Although his movie career is taking off, Leguizamo is not about to stop ruffling ethnic sensitivities with his comedy. He is hard at work on a follow- up to Mambo Mouth, a one-man show in which he will play six members of a half-Dominican, half-Colombian family who are attending a wedding. "I think it could be controversial," he says with an innocent smile. Its title: Spic- o-rama