Stage

...This allows the emphasis on Kander and Ebb's songs as songs, remarkably workable in very different contexts, and rescues theatergoers like me from the bad habit--most recently in evidence at Jerome Robbins's Broadway--of comparing the restaging to the original, to the detriment of the new version...

...GERALD WEALES SCREEN GET THE GUY WITH GLASSES THE COENS' 'BARTON FINK' / feel sorry for Barton Fink...

...In 1941, a newly acclaimed New York playwright is invited to Hollywood to work on scripts for a major studio...

...On the night I saw the show, Leguizamo came out in a bathrobe, quarreling with the management over lighting, invited the audience as allies, a character that was partly himself and halfway to Agamemnon, the host of a call-in show who was the first of his characters...

...The cast (three women, two men) is young, spirited, talented, able to shift with ease from the broadly comic to the sentimental and romantic...

...There is variety in the characters that follow, but all of them are nonstop talkers, using Leguizamo's verbal skills to assert a momentary sense of who they are and, in the process, giving cultural substance to the phrase Mambo Mouth...

...The needle in this routine is that he advises crossing over to become Japanese since the United States is presumably on the economic skids...

...That song is not in And the World Goes 'Round, but there is a heavy helping of the familiar, and the unfamiliar, show songs and others that pre- sumably were written as special material for club performers-- "Sara Lee," for instance, a very funny love song to the baker which is performed with great sincerity by Joel Blum...

...In his "savage comedy," as the subtitle calls it, Leguizamo presents a gallery of Latino characters (the program lists seven, but he chooses among them so that no performance is exactly like the others) who use and explode the stereotypes, making broad fun of the dress, the manner, the characteristics of his creations and--judging by the night I saw the show---delighting the large Hispanic section of the audience who respond to familiar gestures, intonations, words, and have the added advantage of Spanish throwaway lines which, I gather, were sometimes jokes about the more obtuse "white" playgoers, to use his designation...

...Aside from all the humiliating things that happen to him in the movie of which he is the eponymous hero, Barton has one terrible strike against him right from the start: his creators hate him...

...Except for the dancing silhouette of a sexy young woman, helping Leguizamo change costumes and characters behind a screen (a macho joke, of course), Mambo Mouth is a solo per- formance in which the author becomes the characters that he has written...

...Agamemnon's pitch is to give sex advice to his male callers, parading his own macho image in a bit that suggests that he is all talk, no action, which may explain his abusive attitude toward women...

...Pepe is an illegal immi- grant who tries to convince the immigration man, presumably also Hispanic, not to turn him back in, a sketch that suggests that Leguizamo, as writer, is stronger when he is funny and out- rageous than when he is sentimental...

...As the lecture proceeds, however, music comes in from the wings and, unable to control his Latino legs, the crossover Japanese loses his facade...

...The very model of a good-natured slob, Charley listens patiently to our hero's idealistic babblings and proffers the sort 550: Commonweal...

...This reassertion of the Latino self suggests that the "savage" of the subtitle is too strong...

...Loco Louie is a kid with a large radio and a recurrent dance step who tells a friend about his sexual initiation in a neighborhood bodega-brothel, an event which may or may not have taken place...

...On fire to create a theater for the "common man," young Fink temporizes over the Dream Factory's offer but his agent talks him into going...

...of course, this female hero is a man, but let that pass...

...And the Worm Goes 'Round is all its own and a very enjoyable own it is...

...It is a revue described by its subtitle: "The Songs of Kander & Ebb...

...On the contrary, the plot, in outline, has promise...

...the show is affectionate as well...

...f I were particularly ingenious, I would invent a bridge to connect And the World Goes 'Round with Mambo Mouth, but except that it too is an off-Broadway hit, I am bridgeless...

...Although there are songs from the team's big hits--Cabaret and Chicago--the creators rifle the flops as well: The Rink, for instance, and 70, Girls, 70, a show that I thought should have had a run if only for Mildred Natwick's singing of"The Elephant Song...

...For me, a "white" playgoer, some of the characters--particularly Loco Louie--are overdone, but that may well be one of the points Mambo Mouth wants to make...

...Manny the Fanny is a transvestite prostitute whose long story about using Crazy Glue on the penis of her abusive lover allows Leguizamo to balance Agamemnon's view of women...

...The Spanish rhythm of his speech has been replaced by the deliberateness of English as spoken uncertainly but very accurately by a Japanese man still new to the language...

...In any case, it is a fine showcase for Leguizamo's versatility as a performer and his talent as a writer...

...The final, and in some ways the most effective figure, is the Crossover King, who is lecturing his fellow Latinos--with slides---on the need to discard flamboyant clothes and behavior to create conservative images of success...

...Those creators, Ethan and Joel Coen, haven't expressed that hatred by sticking Barton into an uninteresting story...

...Wearing a black suit, horn-rim glasses, and a neat hairdo, Leguizamo might almost pass as a Japanese businessman...

...Disoriented by the West Coast ambiance, lonely in his fleabag hotel, and mentally blocked from completing (or even beginning) the Wallace Beer), wrestling picture assigned him, our hero finds solace in the simple cama- raderie provided by his next door neighbor, Charley, an insurance salesman...

...They might even have a common man in Hollywood," the agent jocularly suggests...

...And, yes, Barton finds him...

...Many of the numbers have been staged as minidramas, but the most sensible decision of the show's creators--Scott Ellis (director), Susan Stroman (choreographer), and David Thompson--is that they do not try to recreate the numbers as they were originally done...