Review: John Leguizamo’s ‘Kiss My Aztec!’ goes overboard for a laugh at the Hartford Stage

“Kiss My Aztec!,” if you trust the essay in the Hartford Stage program by its co-creators John Leguizamo and David Kamp, or Leguizamo’s editoral in the Courant last week, wants to be about representation and inequity and injustice and “learning about human history, even the ugly parts.”

In practice, it just wants to make you laugh, rather transparently, desperately and not all that successfully, for 2 1/2 hours. It doesn’t really care how the laughs come, and most of the humor is the silly, dirty or funny-voice kind — superficial stuff that doesn’t fuel either thought or drama.

The show’s complete lack of respect for everything, including itself, means that it’s hard to get emotionally invested in it. Romantic subplots are barely taken seriously, then wrapped up unsatisfyingly in a line or two. None of the characters are believable because the actors aren’t allowed to believe in them themselves. A soothsayer doesn’t cackle, she says the words, “Cackle cackle cackle.”

There are codpiece jokes, torture jokes, Spanish Inquisition jokes that add nothing to the genre that Monty Python founded in 1971 and Donald Trump jokes. There are dozens of jokes based on the idea that French words are funny, the kind of thing you’d think went out with Jerry Lewis or Sid Caesar 50 years ago. Since the action is set in the 16th century — though it’s presented in a lively Latino-Futurist contemporary style with street clothes and a graffiti-art backdrop — most of the characters speak in fractured Elizabethan English, with “thees” and “thous” and “dost” and “dosteth.”

”Kiss My Aztec!” is clamoring for respect for an underappreciated culture, but it doesn’t mind mocking how other cultures look and speak.

The play’s “anything for a laugh” means that many jokes are likely to work if just due to the percentages involved, but too many of the gags are weak, repetitive, not well thought through, not particularly well-delivered or just not memorable. Some are more vulgar than funny. While it’s not surprising that a show about race and rebellion would make some jokes that come off as racist, they’re problematic and not even defensible as good jokes.

The comedy is at best hit-or-miss, but what really drags “Kiss My Aztec!” down is its musical numbers with longwinded lyrics credited to Leguizamo, Kamp and Benjamin Velez and music by Velez. They barely qualify as songs, though they have hip-hop elements that barely qualify as raps either. They all have the same basic structure: too-long lines of lyrics that end in quick simplistic rhymes and are summed up by repeating the song’s key phrase (usually its title) over and over. Those phrases include “White People on Boats,” “God must be gay,” “Punk-Ass Geek-A,” “Spooneth Me” and “No One Compareth to the Spanish.” There, you’ve just heard the punchlines.

There is none of the complexity of traditional musical theater lyrics or of worthwhile rap, just a lot of words and easy rhymes. No melodies. No pushing the plot forward. Nothing you could lift out of the show and put into a cabaret concert. Nothing profound. Nothing you’ll come close to humming on your way out of the theater.

An unseen live band plays these endless rhymed couplets in various styles — R&B, rock, a cappella, soul. It doesn’t matter because they’re basically just extra speeches, in some cases ones the one-dimensional characters have already basically delivered, done again with random music playing under them. When it comes time for a rousing musical finale, the underwhelming score takes what little it has going for it and does even less: A tedious, interminable rave-like “Throwdown Showdown” dance battle with cheesy lighting and confusing staging.

At least “Kiss My Aztec!” keeps you involved in the moment. The comedy may be forced and bad, but the actors are truly committed to it. There are lots of big crowd scenes and dance routines using the whole 13-person cast. The whole show is loud, fast and colorful. Director Tony Taccone, who did much more inspired social satire with his Yale Rep productions of the children’s opera “Brundibar” and Culture Clash’s revue “Culture Clash in AmeriCCa” a couple of decades ago, co-wrote “Kiss My Aztec!”s script with Leguizamo and matches the hyper writing with a manic staging that features a stage-length moving sidewalk.

As with “Anastasia,” another musical that played Hartford Stage, the theater’s thrust stage has been shortened to a more proscenium-style arrangement and a special seating section has been added to the auditorium right at the front of the stage. Tickets to this “fan section” come with a coupon for a free drink and a “limited edition swag bag.” It’s a good marketing technique that ensures enthusiastic patrons in the front rows.

There are some wonderful performers in the ensemble, like Richard Ruiz Henry, who is warmly remembered for “Assassins” at Yale Rep and “Oliver!” at the Goodspeed, and the hysterical Maria-Christina Oliveras, who is on the theater faculty at Wesleyan University. Joel Perez, last seen on a Connecticut stage in the experimental opera “Stuck Elevator” at the Long Wharf Theatre in 2013, is the ostensible male lead of the show, a young Aztec named Pepe who’d rather play with sock puppets than become a soldier. Pepe must deliver a steady stream of dumb jokes while fending off nasty authority figures from basically every community he encounters, including his own. He falls for Colombina, a skilled fighter and strategist who is not allowed to fight due to gender discrimination. She makes a good, serious straight woman for his non-stop jesting.

John Leguizamo does not appear in the show but delivers the jokey pre-recorded, pre-show “turn off your phones” announcement, where he notes “I’m not in it” and that it’s too late to get a refund.

Leguizamo grew “Kiss My Aztec!” out of research he did for his solo show “Latin History for Morons.” That show, which was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 2018, is structured like a classroom lecture, complete with chalk and blackboard. It has a few moments of loud music but otherwise none of the expensive, expansive flash and style of “Kiss My Aztec.” Yet Leguizamo, solo, creates more merrier, deeper characters than an entire ensemble can at Hartford Stage. More importantly, “Latin History for Morons” has a message. Both “Latin History for Morons” and “Kiss My Aztec” make history fun, but the solo show has a thesis: Why don’t we know this history?

“Kiss My Aztec!” could use that message, too, but instead it just creates a phony love story and a battle yarn about dressing up funny to infiltrate the castle of an idiot despot. It pretends to be about something sometimes, but it’s too busy propping up its weak plot and cramming in more and more cheap jokes to stop and deliver a clear statement. Hard to tell which is the worst offense here, not being about much or not being funny enough.

“Kiss My Aztec!” runs through June 26 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford. Tickets are $30-$100. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., with added matinees on June 15 and 25 at 2 p.m. Masks are encouraged but not required at most performances. The June 14 and 17 evening performances and the June 25 matinee will require masks and proof of vaccination. hartfordstage.org.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.

This article has been altered to correct the phrases “White People on Boats” and “God must be gay” and clarify that not all the repeated phrases in songs are also the titles of the songs.