La Maga de Oz

TheatreworksUSA is offering this new stage musical for young audiences:

Dora feels like she’s caught between two worlds: on one hand, she is expected to embrace the Latino family traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation, but she also wants to be a contemporary American teenager… She sometimes thinks she’s trapped between a pinto bean and a cheeseburger. Dora can’t figure out where she fits in, and she longs for a place where she can forge her own identity.

On the eve of her coming of age quinceañera, a mysterious woman disrupts Dora’s fifteenth birthday fiesta to foretell a journey of discovery that will take her far from home.

Sure enough, a gran tornado carries Dora (and her little dog, too) to a magical world filled with munchkins and a wicked bruja who’ll stop at nothing to steal Dora’s ruby zapatillas.

Dora meets three friends, each from a different Latin culture, while traveling on the amarillo brick road en route to the Emerald City. She seeks the only person who can help her return to the world she knows… the superstar who has all the answers: the Wizard of Oz—la Maga de Oz. 

Converting The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a coming-of-age story is, I believe, driven by the need to cast a teenager as Dorothy. The original tale is about discovering competency rather than identity.