STAGE REVIEWS : Weba Bewitches; Latins Anonymous Provoke and Amuse

“Be who you are.” It’s the message we get from two comedy groups who couldn’t otherwise be more different: Latins Anonymous at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, and Weba and Her Flying Turbans at Cafe Largo.

There’s no question who Latins Anonymous are. They’re Latino and proud of it--and out to make their audiences proud of it. But who is Weba?

Well, she’s funny. We can say that. Her supper show at the Cafe Largo has a Moorish motif--as interpreted by Paramount Pictures. “Come to My Heaven” is its title, and it puts Weba in veils, while her muscle men (Keith Joe Dick and John Garretson) stride around in turbans. Smoking turbans, a novel effect.

Like Scheherazade, Weba sings of many things (to music by Steve Stewart and herself). Love, of course, tops the list. We learn that few women since Cleopatra have explored its delights as conscientiously as Weba. You won’t leave her tent the same person.

At the same time, she betrays a certain insecurity about her figure. To the ringside customer, she looks extremely trim. But Weba knows best, and insists that she has started to spread in the wrong directions. (She dons a doughnut skirt and bumps between the tables so that we get the picture.) Welcome to my nightmare.

There is also a number about bras. Its gist is obscure, but one line is for the ages: “Bras don’t bite.” The Dadaists would have been crazy about Weba.

So am I. But, again, it’s hard to say exactly what she’s doing up there. She doesn’t camp her material, as a female impersonator would. She doesn’t look down on her material, as a satirist would. She enjoys dressing up like Yvonne De Carlo while her boys do their “Road to Morocco” thing. Like a good actress, she even believes it a little.

That, perhaps, is the joke: the power of stock images in our thinking, even as we imagine that we see through them. Behind every Cleopatra, there’s a Cathy trying on a bathing suit. Yet Cleopatra lives.

Maybe that’s what Weba is saying. Then again--maybe she isn’t saying anything. Maybe she’s just enjoying her reincarnation. In any case she makes us smile, as Lucy and Gracie used to do. There’s the same vulnerability and the same professionalism. No veil drops in a Weba show by accident.

It’s of a piece that she sews her own costumes, that John Garretson is her brother and that her mother, Virginia Garretson, did the needlepoint on the Cafe Largo walls, which Weba reminds us is all for sale. She appears Thursday nights at 10 through Oct. 5 at 432 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 852-1073.

Latins Anonymous are a foursome--two guys (Rick Najera, Armando Molina) and two gals (Luisa Leschin and Diane Rodriguez). They make the point that there is no such thing as the Latin Experience, but that there are lots of things that Latins have in common, such as overvaluing blondes.

That’s a problem with Latin men. (At least Latin women see it as one.) Another is the macho syndrome--that constant checking of one’s testosterone level. Najera and Molina are very funny here as two fellows trying to prove that, next to them, Rambo was a wimp.

Latin women? Well, they may be just a bit prone to Latin Denial--the little voice that tells you that, although you were born in East L.A., you were probably adopted. Leschin, for instance, seems to believe that she’s French--or, at worst, Castilian and of royal blood.

Later she overdoses on Wonder Bread and needs tortilla therapy to recover her true roots (not blond). The message here is very direct, but so wildly implemented that it’s not messagey--in action, this gang is as uninhibited as the Bowery Boys, if you can picture them in wigs, glitter and chenille bathrobes.

Rodriguez probably has the strongest inborn comic sense. She’s sublime as a call-in revivalist, and she’s better than that as a curler-crowned yenta (is that a Latino word?) running down everybody in the neighborhood--Cuban, Korean, Jewish, whatever--to her girlfriend (Leschin). When it develops that the girlfriend, too, is one of “them,” the trouble starts.

The woman next to me at LATC’s Theatre 4 wondered how I could possibly identify with any of this. True, it helps to be from East L.A. to enjoy Latins Anonymous. But everybody knows what it’s like to feel excluded and to want to belong, and that’s the basic subject here--how far we’ll go to sell out what we are.

To handle the syndrome with humor and forgiveness, without trivializing it, takes thought. This show isn’t as wild and woolly as it looks. Directors Jose Cruz Gonzalez and Miguel Delgado have known where to rein things in and where to let the fun rip. It does, through Oct. 29, Fridays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2, at 514 S. Spring St. Tickets $15-$18. (213) 627-6500.