Actually quite a little gem! I think they have a couple performances left this week, and I’d earnestly recommend it. ☺️ Next Year in Connecticut! is a charming one-act musical about relatively low-stakes family drama and mental illness. It’s an ensemble piece led by librettist Sarah Rossman as eldest daughter Sonya, and it’s about the disruption to the family’s Passover Seder when she runs over her sister’s therapy dog.

The fundamentals are really solid here. It’s not a heavyweight philosophical piece, but its reach doesn’t exceed its grasp. We get a very pleasant collection of songs that effectively introduce each character, what their deal is, and how they struggle to fit into this family. These songs are later weaved together as leitmotifs by composer Sequoia Sellinger as the evening’s events unfold. I felt like I had a very good handle on who everybody was & what they wanted and was invested in what would happen next. Sarah Rossman, Sarah Corey, and Anna Paloma were highlights but I didn’t feel like the cast had any particularly weak links. It’s all pretty polished and I could see it doing a respectable little run off-Broadway, at which point it would probably be limited by its low-concept schtick.

If I was gonna get nitpicky, I would say they could consider either losing a song or two or going all in on sung-through; they burst into song so frequently that it sometimes feels like, “wow, already?” I also thought that the staging got a little confusing when characters leave the house—space and direction became abstract very abruptly—but I can excuse this for a low-budget run in a shared festival space.