| John Leguizamo's Revisionist History | |
| Last Edit: jgerard 12:22 pm EDT 06/13/18 | |
| Posted by: jgerard 12:20 pm EDT 06/13/18 | |
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| At Sunday's Tony Awards, John Leguizamo told the world that The American Place Theatre "believed so little in me they put me in the hallway" for his first solo show, "Mambo Mouth," in 1990. I'm a fan of Leguizamo and his work, which is why I invited him to write the introduction to WYNN PLACE SHOW, my biography of his teacher, Wynn Handman, and the theater he founded, the American Place (it's published by Smith & Kraus, and you can find it at the Drama Book Shop and Amazon). John titled his preface "A National Treasure." He wrote, of Handman, "In me he saw a punk from Jackson Heights, Queens, New York with a mouth big enough to fit all the voices that would come out of it. Wynn never told me to close my mouth; rather, he encouraged me to keep it wide open and further explore my own voice...Wynn was in love with the art itself, not the trappings of it...I remember testing out 'Mambo Mouth' in his class as my character, Pepe, an illegal alien who is entrapped by a scheme the INS used to use back in the day. Wynn sat there laughing...His love of the work was so infectious it made you want to go out and see everything, read everything and be in everything." Leguizamo won an Obie for "Mambo Mouth," his first solo show, developed in class with Wynn Handman and presented by The American Place Theatre, where many shows began in the SubPlot space. At 96, Handman is still teaching, prodding young actors to develop their own best mambo mouths. So I can only point to another of Wynn's students, Robert DeNiro, and say to you, John, the same bleeped words DeNiro used on Tony night about another self-aggrandizing reviser of truths. |
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