Nygel D. Robinson (Photo by Jeff Lorch)
By Steven Leigh Morris
Pasadena Playhouse
Through August 2
RECOMMENDED
Nygel D. Robinson and Brian Quijada (Photo by Jeff Lorch)
If the roof hadn’t been bolted down at the Pasadena Playhouse, it might have blown away from the hurricane force of Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson’s two-hander musical.
Mexodus isn’t just a musical, it’s a musical in large part about the joy of making music. In so doing, it tells the (until now) little known story of Black American slaves who sought refuge not in the north, but south of the Rio Grande. More specifically, it’s the story of how a slightly inept Mexican farmer, Carlos (Quijada), gives sanctuary to one such runaway slave, Henry (Robinson), being hounded by American bounty hunters.
Their rapport, under such fraught circumstances, is slightly testy — a tale of two outcasts — and Carlos saves Henry not from some nobility of character, which would be ever so tedious and tendentious; rather, his gesture — of helping a wounded soul, washed ashore and half dead — stems from a trauma Carlos carries with a weight he needs to lighten.
This is a story about ties that bind, in so many dimensions. And its presentation is so brazenly theatrical, crashing through the Playhouse’s proscenium, with playful audience interactions and a gallery of musical instruments (from string base, to drums, to a spinet piano to horn) that the pair pluck and plunk and blow with mastery.
Its musical base is hip-hop, to which it keeps returning, after dipping its toes in ballads and spirituals. The core instrument, however, is the looping technology that takes a musical phrase introduced live, then spits it back, creating harmonies for the performers to supplement and build upon, a prelude and fugue for the 21st century. None of this is pre-recorded. It’s built from the stage at each performance. (Credit music director Alan Mendez, and Mikhail Fiksel’s Looping Systems Architecture and Sound designer, all under David Mendizábal’s lucid and coherent staging.)
Riw Rakkulchon’s scenic design and Johnny Moreno’s video/projection design mercifully contains no swatches of the Rio Grande, no black and white photos from the 19th century. That’s for us to conjure from what’s essentially a cluttered music studio where a couple of guys have come to jam. And in that jam, there’s a story to be told, with its twists and turns. This is story-time in the library, where the power comes from the charisma and the skill of the storytellers. Both here are unimpeachable.
Their appeal here, as co-creators, is unapologetically agit-prop. Stop locking doors, the musical says, locking ourselves away into tribes within bubbles. It’s a torch setting fire to the antics of ICE, which it tracks to the storied American history of White Supremacy. Perhaps it’s even a call for open borders, perhaps not particularly nuanced. But their sermon is not from the dais of the U.S. Senate, or Substack, or YouTube — it’s from the pulpit of the Christian Church, the one that’s merciful rather than vengeful, and which is also part of American history. This performance is an emotional reaction to the shape-shifting promise of America. And to tap such raw emotion, there’s no faster route to the soul through the nervous system than music.
Mexodus gives us the sound of, well, music, embracing the revolutionary hip-hop legacy of Hamilton and taking it, joyously, one step further.
Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena; check website for schedule; thru Aug. 2. pasadenaplayhouse.org Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
