The love spills over

The word used to stick in his throat, making him sound like a car engine that doesn’t quite have the spark to turn over. “I lo-lo-lo-. I lo-lo-lo- .... “

John Leguizamo just couldn’t get “love” out, he confesses in his autobiographical one-man show “Sexaholix ... a love story,” which he is performing at the Ahmanson Theatre. Sooner or later, his behavior sent girlfriends walking out the door.

The actor’s emotional constipation was, perhaps, the result of a dysfunctional upbringing. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all communicated through an elaborate language of put-downs, which Leguizamo humorously re-creates in this two-act, two-hour show. Still, they must have passed along good with the bad, because this is a love story, as the title promises.

It’s also a love fest, of sorts. From the moment the 38-year-old actor explodes onto the stage performing a Latin hustle, his fans let out a roar. When he shucks off his leather jacket to better reveal the well-defined body underneath, the room gets still noisier.

Leguizamo sends energy out and, wave after wave, it comes back to him. It is this excitement that will draw audiences to see him, even if they caught this show at the Wiltern in 2001 -- when it was called “John Leguizamo Live!” -- or saw the HBO version, recorded when he took “Sexaholix” to Broadway.

The actor -- best known for the tough guys, oddballs and goofs he has played in movies, from “Casualties of War” to the recent “Moulin Rouge!” and “Empire” -- has been saying in recent interviews that the Ahmanson performances are a return to the darker qualities he was aiming for before deciding that a post-Sept. 11 New York just needed to be entertained. However true that might be, it is a marketing ploy, because the tweaks he has made since the HBO recording are rarely discernable.

Does that matter? Not to fans -- who at Wednesday’s opening included Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire -- who just want to have fun.

Leguizamo employs vivid verbal and body language. Whether impersonating a world-weary older girlfriend who’s instructing him in the finer points of sex or an exasperated Korean doctor who’s overseeing the birth of the actor’s first child, Leguizamo keeps disappearing into his characters.

Along the way, he utters enough four-letter words and mimes enough sex to wilt the starch in the Ahmanson’s reputation. Yet what emerges from this naughty-boy behavior is, under Peter Askin’s direction, rather sweet.

The Colombian-born actor, who grew up in New York, recalls being told as a kid that life was destined to be “pain, failure, misery and Budweiser.” He reenacts childhood whippings in a hip-hop dance of yelps, spins and leaps. He parrots the advice of horny, lamebrained buddies dubbed the Sexaholix.

But above all, he recalls the bedtime misbehavior that earned him that universal parental warning, “Wait till you have kids of your own; you’ll see” -- the curse that’s really a blessing.

Leguizamo’s road to fatherhood is filled with stories that make the audience gasp, then detonate into laughter. But by the end, plenty of people are wiping away tears.

*

‘Sexaholix’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Fridays, 9 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 9 p.m.; this Sunday, 5 p.m.; Tuesday-Thursday, 8 p.m.; March 23, 2 p.m.

Ends: March 23

Price: $20-$60

Contact: (213) 628-2772

Running time: 2 hours