Sarah on theater

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.

The Last Piece

I don’t like writing at length about shows that weren’t my cup of tea. (It makes me feel mean.) I really love finding the good in small shows but I found this very questionable as a festival selection.

I actually thought “The Last Piece” had kind of a neat premise: a divorced couple is brought back together by an early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis and hash out their memories together as he begins to forget. Laurel Sharakan, who plays the lead, Amara, has a really standout voice.

The writing just doesn’t work. This comes from the mind of writer Shreya Jha (book, music, lyrics), who is a moonlighting medical student, and it’s just—ugh. Syrupy. Jargon-y. They do not speak like people. The songs are very weak. I’m sure she’ll make an excellent physician. A lot of people leaving this one at intermission.

Wilderness!

This was a big swing. Nicolet, the fourth-most successful competitor at a series of international spelling bees (and apparent celebrity for it), is placed under house arrest when another contestant turns up dead. She becomes convinced that someone is sending her messages through the local newspapers’ “word of the day” feature, and things get complicated when the police start sending her ex-girlfriend to her home to make wellness checks.

There were some things I liked about “The Word of the Day.” The set definitely suggests crazy-person apartment and the lighting was fairly nice, gently steering us through warm scenes about the relationships of these characters, chilling scenes in which we unravel the mystery, and one very red fever dream. Paris Adorno makes a pretty tough role, the ex, Magdalena, who pretty much takes it on the chin the entire time, easy to root for. The show spins a good amount of tension out of a pretty far-fetched premise.

I think this could work a little better in its current form. A lot of the steady drip-drip is us coming to understand the exact relationships between these characters, and while Elisa Tarquinio does a fine job individually as Nicolet, she has very little chemistry with Paris’s Magdalena, which makes some of the early-middle a grind.

For a more comprehensive retooling, I’d reconsider the premise itself—it’s just so complicated, and it doesn’t all quite pay off. I would probably try to simplify it. I also just don’t really think that Nicolet reads as the linguistics savant she’s supposed to be, but, golly, that’s a tough character to write or perform with authenticity.

Next Year in Connecticut!

I really dug the premise of this one—evidently there was a “dancing plague” in 1518? I thought the writing was solid but I think it could use a couple coats of polish. I would love to play amateur dramaturge and mess with it a little bit.

Strasbourg seems like sort of a tough setting to bring to life on stage for an unfamiliar audience given the mixed French/German influence—tropey points of reference seem liable to introduce confusion. The directorial choice here seems to have been basically to not try, which I guess is okay for a festival, but the American accents and routine mispronunciations (fraulein!) did bug me. My family on one side immigrated from the area and I’m a stickler for accents in general so I concede some sensitivity to this, I guess.

The Garden Bridge

Wow, this ruled. What a thoughtful (and tricky) slice of history to tell—Austrian Jewish refugees in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation in WW2—and Jill Ohayon’s book nailed it, and what a gorgeous score by Andy Li. (Classical influences and sounded great played by a piano/violin/cello chamber trio.) The kind of as-of-yet-underexposed delight that validates seeing a whole bunch of other obscure stuff. Full marks, as festival shows go, but I would love to see (and think this deserves) a more elaborate production. Ending needs to be tinkered with a bit - it hits the right beats but needs to reconfigure them a little bit to really make it sing.

What the heck! I went to grade school with someone in this. (That’s probably not that weird for some of you, but I grew up in Nebraska!) I didn’t even know until he walked out on stage. Small world. I’ll recuse but in general I thought it was pretty cute.

As a note for the entire festival, you gotta mic people up if you’re going to thrust-stage a musical—there were some parts of this and the others that I just couldn’t hear very well because they were singing away from me.

Pas de Trois, or The Dancing Witch Play