At the same time Hamilton also made hip-hop a viable sound for the musical and so I thought rap lyrics and hip-hop beats would infiltrate subsequent musicals the way that jazz did in the 1920s after Shuffle Along or rock did a half century later after Hair. But, except for a novelty song here or there, that hasn’t happened.
So it was a delight for me to discover the terrifically entertaining new show Mexodus that is now scheduled to run through Oct. 18 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, where it is billing itself as “a two-person live-looped new musical.”
The two persons are Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, who wrote the show, are its only performers and its sole musicians (click here to read more about them). Although their show's impressive aural achievement owes a huge debt to the looping technique constructed by Mikhail Fiksel, the audio wiz behind the sound design for Dana H. that helped Deidre O’Connell lip sync her way to a Tony back in 2022.
The story Mexodus tells is as fresh as its format. It centers around the little-known history of the underground railroad's southern route that allowed slaves to escape into Mexico, which abolished slavery in 1829, more than three decades before Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.
This version of that history, inspired by Robinson’s own family lore, focuses on the relationship between a black man named Henry who flees across the Rio Grande after accidentally killing the white man who owned him; and a Mexican man named Carlos, a former army medic whose bitterness about the way the U.S. confiscated so much of his country's land after the Mexican-American War makes him willing to take the risk of providing a refuge for Henry.
In turn, Henry shares his farming know-how with Carlos, who's been having trouble bringing in his crops. The subtext about the way black and brown people can mutually benefit by uniting against "The Man" in the present day is clearly intentional.
Now these are admittedly heavy topics for a feel-good show (and this show is that) but Robinson, tall and almost majestic, and Quijada, more compact and mischievous, are equally engaging performers and they’ve laced their tale with the kind of sly humor and strategic fourth-wall breaking that allow them to sidestep pedantry. They’re also wonderfully versatile musicians.
Between them, they play piano, drums, double bass, guitar, harmonica, accordion, trumpet and a washer board. The looping technique allows them to record live a few phrases or riffs on one of those instruments and then play it back as they overlay another track and another until a satisfying melody has been created.
Plus they sing. Really well. And the resulting songs, which include blues ballads, canciónes rancheras and straight-ahead rap, are shoulder-bouncing good. They also serve the story, additional proof, if still needed, that this kind of music can bring a contemporary vitality to the standard musical vocabulary.
The entire creative team—including director and costume designer David Mendizábal, choreographer Tony Thomas, lighting designer Mextly Couzin, projection designer Johnny Moreno and scenic designer Riw Rakkulchon who has devised all sorts of clever places for the instruments to be stored when they’re not being played—is just as inventive.
Throughout the show Quijada shifts back and forth between English and Spanish, with a little Spanglish thrown in for good measure. But there’s never a need for translation. The whole thing is simplemente fantástico.
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