Review: Mosaic Theater Company Premieres "Somewhere Over the Border"

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The immigrant story meets Wizard of Oz in DC premiere of new musical

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At the turn of the 20th century, L. Frank Baum released the first installment in his seminal fantasy epic for children. Amid the Second Industrial Revolution, the traditional, rural way of life in the United States was being dramatically overturned, with more and more economic power being consolidated in urban centers and in large corporations and their wealthy owners. In the world of politics, the recent Spanish-American War and the U.S.’s ensuing control over Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Cuba thrust issues of American imperialism and expansionism into the center of the 1900 presidential election.

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It was in that very year that Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a robust and complex moral tale that planted seeds of fanciful magic in the familiar cornfields of home, in which glittering new towering cities are revealed to be shallow mirages and the most powerful, important men turn out to be simple tricksters, and where the things we are missing are found not in gaudy objects or in some foreign place but buried deep within ourselves. The book was already straightforwardly political upon debut; when the Scarecrow asks Dorothy why exactly she is so eager to leave the magical Land of Oz for as common a place as Kansas she pointedly responds, “That is because you have no brains. No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.” Take that, manifest destiny.

A massive triumph, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz spawned numerous adaptations, starting practically immediately with a hit Broadway run in 1902. A few decades later in 1939, Oz arrived on the big screen in a live-action motion picture that has defined the story’s place in the popular culture ever since, with its various original stylistic contributions to the book—the sepia-toned opening, swapping silver shoes for Ruby Slippers , and the Wicked Witch’s green skin to name but a few—becoming fixtures in essentially all future adaptations. Which is something of a slight oddity, considering that it is the book, and not the film, which is in the public domain.

Now, one hundred and twenty-six years later, Mosaic Theater Company is opening their new season with the DC premiere of Brian Quijada ’s Somewhere Over the Border, directed by Raymond O. Caldwell, a riff on Baum’s work which swaps turn-of-the-century Kansas for 1970s El Salvador, the magical Land of Oz for the United States, and the road of yellow brick for the arduous journey through Guatemala, Mexico, and the treacherous border crossing through the desert.

In this telling, Reina (Pepin) is the young, single mother of a newborn baby boy, living with her brother Adán (Oscar Salvador Jr.) and strict, demanding mother Julia ( Natascia Diaz ) in a little town, struggling to get by in an El Salvador beset by poverty, military dictatorship, and the looming threat of all out civil war. Dreaming of a better life, Reina resolves to leave home and flee to the United States via the services of El Gran Coyote (Camilo Linares,) a man who smuggles immigrants through border control in exchange for a costly sum.

Along the road she meets a colorful cast of characters who join her in her voyage to the States, including Cruz (Salvador Jr.,) a smart-witted banana farmer dreaming of studying agriculture in an American university, Silvano (Mejiah,) an alcoholic hotel owner hoping to reunite with his estranged family in Pittsburgh, and Leona (Gloria Vivica Benavides,) a high-strung, dancing and singing nun intent on traveling to the rock-and-roll mecha of the world, Cleveland.

And there it is. If you’re at all familiar with The Wizard of Oz then you already know how Somewhere Over the Border goes. It’s a peculiar piece of theater. Border isn’t so much a modern, original work that borrows bits and bobs from Baum as a cultural touch stone (a la West Story Story with Romeo and Juliet, The Lion King with Hamlet, and, of course, The Lion King 1 1 ⁄ 2 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ) as it is a surprisingly straightforward, scene for scene rehash with the names and places switched. Which is exactly what The Wiz was doing in 1974, making Border feel like a rehash of a rehash.

Except that The Wiz understood the source material better than Quijada. For how closely Border sticks to the original story, it never comes across that Quijada has a grasp on Baum’s plot, characters, symbols, and what makes them good.

Take Quijada’s take on the Scarecrow. The Scarecrow, being a scarecrow, doesn’t literally have a brain and so is on the journey in order to request one from the Wizard of Oz. The thing is, he’s clearly shown to be the smartest member of the group throughout the journey—by coming up with good ideas and working out how to save his comrades when they need help—and so when the time comes for Oz to give him said brains, he tells the Scarecrow, “You don’t need them… Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.” Like with all things Oz, the reward is not at the end of the journey but in the journeying.

In Border, Cruz is on the journey in order to attend university. The thing is, he’s clearly shown to be the smartest member of the group throughout the journey. This is communicated by Cruz being an annoying pedant and correcting irrelevant grammar mistakes. There’s no lesson to be learned here, because unlike with the Scarecrow, being intelligent is actually a qualification for attending university and not a nullification of the need to do so. It doesn’t end up mattering either way, because Cruz, Silvano, and Leona all disappear from the show in its structural third act making their respective plotlines pointless.

More centrally, Reina’s character arc doesn’t superimpose well onto Dorothy’s either. Dorothy is swept up in a literal cyclone and taken to the Land of Oz, from which she immediately is desperate to return. Reina, in turn, simply decides to leave El Salvador for the United States in an overly repetitive sequence of the same scene happening again three times in a row, while the show invokes the spirit of the tornado idea in name only. But there is no tornado, neither a literal or metaphorical one. There is no inciting incident, Reina simply abandons her baby (who would have thought that turning Toto into a human child would so significantly downgrade his presence and importance in the story) and leaves.

Startlingly, her demeanor on the journey is carefree and blasé. While Dorothy never faltered in her resolve to get back home to her family, Reina seems to rarely think or worry about her son, her mother, her town, her country. While Dorothy’s superpower was her unending empathy, at the end of Border , when Reina does finally return to a war-savaged El Salvador, she remains entirely invested only in herself.

The conceptual failures continue. Unlike the Wizard of Oz, who lives a lie and ultimately fails to return Dorothy home, Border’s El Gran Coyote, an opportunity to delve into the very real problems associated with an often exploitative industry, ends up doing exactly as he promises with relative ease. When Reina does arrive in the United States she initially sees it to be a facade, like Baum’s Emerald City, saying that the American Dream doesn’t exist for people who look like her. All that’s severely undercut immediately when Reina continues by announcing that she then worked hard, started a business, got a green card, and is able to send money home and bring her child to America. What is it exactly that Border thinks the American Dream is?

Perhaps the most jarring example is in the production’s final image. Throughout Border Reina has dreamed of having enough money to provide shoes for her son. In the very end, when she has made it, she reveals a pair of ruby-bedazzled Air Jordans she has bought for her now ten-years old boy. She taps them together, fade to black.

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy uses her silver shoes, the prize that the Wicked Witch had so desperately longed for, to come back home, losing them in the process. Everything that really mattered, in the end, was everything that Dorothy already had in the beginning. in Something Over the Border, Reina leaves her ancestral home in order to cherish a symbol of vapid, celebrity obsessed, consumerism. It’s not that there isn’t an interesting and immensely topical, worthy conversation to be had here about the ethics of staying and fighting for our homes in times of political and economic turmoil, versus the practical necessity of leaving to find a better home elsewhere. It’s just that Border is either incapable or uninterested in ever having that conversation.

Tonally, Border falls in an uncomfortable middleground. Quijada has, in theory, super-imposed such adult horrors as the Salvadoran Civil War and the Mexico-United States border crossing onto the framework of a children’s story, but produced a work that is confused and indecisive about its own audience.

Again, Border stays glued to the original Oz, sucking out all the tension from the proceedings — those hoping that at some point Quijada will intentionally subvert or surprise will be disappointed. The pacing is still that of a children’s story, the characterizations are still those of a children story, as are the moral lessons and performances. Border even adds in a bubbly narrator figure (Linares) who addresses and engages the audience with all the pep and verve of a children’s TV host.

And while the expectation would be that all this would be balanced by Border’s subject matter, the show ends up avoiding its own stakes at all costs. The massacres of El Salvador are talked about and only ever talked about, yelled out by the narrator or recited from a newspaper headline, but they never arrive on the stage or even directly affect the story in any way. On Reina’s dangerous journey, there is the constant apprehension that something terrible is likely to happen to her and her companions, and then nothing ever does. After an hour or so of talking up the very real threats of the border crossing, Border’s depiction of it reveals itself as cartoonishly easy and short. Like with everything else in a show addicted to telling and allergic to showing, conflict is discussed to no end, but it never arrives. The other slipper never drops.

So who exactly is Border for? Broadway classics such as Fiddler on the Roof and Man of La Mancha proved decades ago that it is very possible to tell ultimately devastating stories through the joys and spectacle of the American musical, and to be impactful to a wide audience while doing so, but Border ends up stranded in the middle of nowhere, “too young for the old people and too old for the young ones,” as is said in Company.

That confusion over its own audience can even be seen in the lengthy pre-show announcements which are delivered, exuberantly, in both English and Spanish. But Border isn’t actually a bilingual show. It could have been, if it wanted to be, like West Side Story’s 2009 revival which translated two songs into Spanish, or it could have even been subtitled, like performances at DC’s GALA Hispanic Theatre. There’s nothing wrong with Border not being a bilingual or Spanish-speaking show, but why lead with an empty-handed ge

_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/washington-dc/article/BWW-Reviews-SOMEWHERE-OVER-THE-BORDER-at-Mosaic-Theater-Company-20260916)._