Review: John Leguizamo: Ghetto Klown | Majestic Theatre - Dallas

Dallas — John Leguizamo studied with Lee Strasberg, among other renowned acting teachers, early in his career. But the most important lesson he learned was from his first teacher, an aged woman who he calls "Tweety" because of the three hairs on the top of her head.

She turned him on to reading plays, and as he delved into works by Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard and Miguel Piñero, he discovered something revelatory. To paraphrase from his latest one-man show Ghetto Klown, which opened Thursday night at the Majestic Theatre: "no matter how [messed] up your life is, you could put it down on paper."

And that's what he has been doing throughout his career as a solo performer, from his early off-Broadway successes Mambo Mouth and Spic-O-Rama, to Broadway's Freak and Sexaholix...a love story. Ghetto Klown, which was on Broadway in 2011, is no different, except that he has more clarity and perspective, the latter of which comes with age (he'll hit the big 5-0 in the next few years).

In other words, there's more messed-up stuff to talk about and use as fodder for reflection and growth. Some think that most people stop making so many mistakes after their 20s, but Leguizamo lays it out: not so true. In fact, as he tells it, he made some of the bigger screw-ups in the past decade, even after he was Tony-nominated for Sexaholix (which toured and came to Dallas in 2003).

In Ghetto Klown, he's honest about it and works the failures into side-splittingly funny, entertaining and foul-mouthed threads (a favorite line: "coke and booze are gateway drugs to Christianity"). He acts out and impersonates characters that range from his parents, agents and girlfriends/ex-wives to movie stars like Al Pacino, Steven Seagal and Patrick Swayze.

And he doesn't hold back. Seagal in particular gets a verbal thrashing, and the story about a fight with Swayze on the set of To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, is a riot. Even more priceless is the one about being continuously slapped in take after take by method actor Sean Penn on location in Thailand for Casualties of War.

He incorporates video more interestingly than he has with previous shows, and exhausts the audience with boundless energy as he transitions through the decades of his life.

The thrust of Ghetto Klown is that in the midst of acting for film, a financial and artistic necessity—for every gem like Romeo+Juliet there was one or more busts (ahem, Super Mario Brothers); and the roles of "drug dealer" were all too prevalent—he always came back to writing and performing for the stage. Theater kept him in check.

If the show starts to feel long by the end of the first act, he reenergizes the crowd in the second, and then brings it together with beautifully emotional scenes about reconciling (somewhat) with his parents, both of whom he has performed as characters for his audiences to see. (Which didn't set well with either.)

He even works in quotes by Rilke and Mishima, in their original German and Japanese, one of his more clever gags.

Leguizamo may start Ghetto Klown by warning that it is a cautionary tale, an "example of what not to do." But as he realizes how the magic of theater has inspired him, which no doubt inspires his audiences, then we could all stand to enroll in Klown college.

◊ Read our Q&A with John Leguizamo here.