To paraphrase Aaliyah: Cast size ain’t nothing but a number. In the realm of the theater, no one exactly equates the number of headshots on a Playbill page with the ultimate fulfillment a stage show provides. Still, a question may arise: How few people can you have in a musical and still generate just as many killowatt-hours of energy as a full ensemble production?
It’s not a theoretical question. An answer strongly comes to us with the musical now playing at Pasadena Playhouse, “Mexodus,” a two-hander that can feel like a 20-hander as you’re going with the boisterous flow and forgetting to do the math. The show has Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson as both its writers and its stars, and these are two fellows who ought to be able to write their own tickets for some time to come, on the basis of this (asterisk: at least to the extent that anyone in the theater can), as actors and/or songwriters. Heck, if either of them decided to go really minimalist after this and do a one-man show, I’d be among the first in line.
But in “Mexodus,” it takes two to tango, or to collaborate on a mixture of musical styles, with the complementary flavors of hip-hop and traditional Tex-Mex balladry at the top of the list. It very much feels like a spawn of “Hamilton,” in that it’s a period piece set in a century well before ours with a considerable amount of rapping at the outset. That’s an anachronism you may enjoy or even feel exhilarated by, even as you’re hoping maybe not the entirety of the show plays out in that style. It doesn’t, of course. Part of what gives “Mexodus” such a kick is how expert Quijada and Robinson turn out to be as writers and singers in a surprising number of genres that expand throughout the show in a kind of beautifully inverse proportion to the number of actual players on stage.
Two things to know straight off: One, “Mexodus” is a good time at the theater. And, two, it’s a slavery story. If those two key factors seem like they might cancel each other out, you won’t be the first to wonder how a narrative spun off from the United States’ greatest shame, set in the days before emancipation, can be reconciled with feel-good entertainment. There’s an easy answer to that: Most of the action takes place south of the border, after the enslaved Henry (Robinson) has made his escape to Mexico, where he finds an uneasy benefactor in a rancher, Carlos (Quijada). The horrors of what Henry has left behind — and could easily be returned to — are hardly skipped over. But ultimately it’s a story about the sometimes tentative, sometimes tight relationship between Black and brown people… ostensibly in the 1860s, but by historical extension the 2020s, too.
The question is set up: Can Latinos and Blacks form a more perfect union as they both deal, with varying degrees of deadliness, with white America? In exploring that coming together of two marginalized (to say the least) North American cultures, “Mexodus” finally lands in a place of not just cautious optimism but a good reason to throw a musical-theater party.
Before the narrative starts up in earnest, the show opens with a good stretch of fourth-wall-breaking, as Quijada and Robinson greet the house and explain the rules of how all the music will be created in the intermission-less hour-and-a-half to follow. A full vocal and instrumental sound will be put together via looping, which will not require much explanation for anyone who knows anything about, say, Ed Sheeran’s live performances. (Ariana Grande even has a looping exercise in her current tour.) For a less pop-savvy theater crowd that might require more backstory on the gambit, it involves Robinson and/or Quijada singing a background part, or playing a drumbeat or acoustic guitar riff, then having these bits lap and layer over one another, with the use of a turntable or pedal or knob or offstage assistant. There’s an impressive magic effect that occurs when one or two men are able to quickly turn themselves into a pit band, or off-Broadway chorale. But to the duo’s credit, there’s at least as much kismet happening when they aren’t messing with these effects at all but knocking us out with, say, an unexpected Spanish-guitar duet. There’s probably a version of this show that these two could pull off without any of the looping tech; it’d be interesting to see and hear them try doing a “Mexodus Unplugged.” But probably no one in the audience will begrudge their ability to come up with a full sound and heavy pulse by the time a mirror ball lights up at stage right.
“Mexodus” does mean to be a history lesson, without becoming too pedantic a peda. In their narrator mode, Quijada and Robinson offer a stat that an estimated 4,000 to 10,000 enslaved people made their way to freedom on a lesser-known Underground Railroad that went south instead of north. Once the story gets underway, they don’t break in with too many more factoids. But each of the two principals does get a sort of time-out in the action in which they recount what seems to be an actually autobiographical memory of interaction earlier in their lives with “the other” — not the white other, but with Blacks, in Quijada’s case, and Latinos, in Robinson’s. It’s easy to imagine a director less sensitive than David Mendizábal trying to convince the writer-actors that the show doesn’t need these twin outlier moments. But these anecdotes serve as lovely grace notes in reminding the audience that the relatively happy outcome to the fictional-historical story isn’t meant to suggest that the Black and brown populi have exactly been in perfect alignment since the mid-1860s. Robinson and Quijada make such a perfect dream team, you want to believe that everyone they’re standing in for in real life is as sympatico as their characters turn out to be. These reflective, personal bits help ground the show in the inevitable realization that things are tense all over… still.
But you come to “Mexodus” to be elevated, not to keep crashing back to earth. It’s a show where issues of melanin meet melatonin, and if that sounds at all like a forced marriage, you haven’t seen the ease of how Quijada and Robinson’s writing and performance styles are wed here.
Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson in “Mexodus” at Pasadena Playhouse
Thomas Mundell
It may help that L.A. is getting this show about as fresh out of New York’s heat and humidity as theatrical productions come. Quijada and Robinson initially performed it in a twice-extended run at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York in 2025, then quickly revived it for an additional engagement at the Daryl Roth Theatre that wrapped up on June 14 — with NYC being enraptured enough to give the show four Lucille Lortel Awards, four Outer Critics Circle Awards, three Drama Desk Awards, Off Broadway Alliance Award and a Drama League Award. After all that, they barely had time to take a cross-country flight before picking things up in Pasadena, whose Playhouse barely had time to usher out its acclaimed “Brigadoon” revival in time to make way for this two-man tuner. It feels like Pasadena just got in a big shipment of adrenaline, in other words.
And almost regardless of the merits of the show itself (but not quite), it’s worth catching even if you’re just a fan of hungry and talented actors going above and beyond in making work — ultra-high-quality work — for themselves. Now, here are two guys who know how to build, if not quite an actual Underground Railroad, one hell of a funicular.
“Mexodus” continues at Pasadena Playhouse through Aug. 2. Ticket information can be found at PasadenaPlayhouse.org.
