Chelsea Gabrielle Rose's New Musical 'Loving This Year' Heads to Off-Broadway and Circle Theatre Festival This Fall 2026

Theatre professionals and casting hopefuls in the New York area have a compelling new project to put on their radar. Loving This Year, a multi-generational family musical drama set against the upheaval of 2020, is currently in casting and pre-production ahead of a fall 2026 run that includes a presentation at the Circle Theatre Festival in October and an Off-Broadway opportunity at AMT Theatre in New York City. With production set to begin October 3 and run through November 13, the window for getting involved is open now, and the creative team is actively in the casting process.

The production is the work of Chelsea Gabrielle Rose, who is serving as director, writer, and casting director on the project. That triple role signals a deeply personal, author-driven vision for this piece. While Rose may not yet carry the marquee name recognition of a seasoned Broadway veteran, the fact that she is shepherding this story from page to stage to festival submission all at once suggests a creator with strong ownership of her material and a clear artistic point of view. For actors and collaborators who value working closely with an originating writer-director, this kind of project can be an especially rewarding creative environment. Theatre professionals who like to get in early on new work, before a production scales up or transfers, will recognize the appeal here.

The story itself centers on a multi-generational family navigating the year 2020 in real time, with all of its grief, political chaos, and emotional exhaustion. The narrative follows a pair of grandparents anchoring the family as their adult children and grandchildren each grapple with the specific traumas of that year, from loss and illness to the larger social ruptures that defined the period. The musical format suggests that the piece uses song to access the emotional interior of that experience rather than simply dramatize it, which is a challenging and ambitious structural choice. Productions dealing with recent, lived trauma in musical form require performers with significant emotional range and strong vocal ability. Casting for this kind of material is rarely superficial.

The producing team brings together AMT Theatre, RJ Theatre Company, and the Circle Theatre Festival. AMT Theatre, based in Midtown Manhattan, is a well-established Off-Broadway home for emerging and developmental work, known for supporting new musicals and plays through its producing partnerships and festival programming. For theatre companies and individual artists, AMT is a respected launchpad, and its involvement here signals that Loving This Year is being positioned as a serious piece of new work, not a workshop showcase. The Circle Theatre Festival provides an additional platform for the production to be seen by industry eyes, which matters enormously for a new musical seeking future life beyond its initial run.

The production will be based at AMT Theatre in New York City, which is the practical home base for this run. New York's theatre community is, of course, one of the deepest talent pools in the world, so local actors, musical directors, stage managers, and production personnel should have ready access to this opportunity without relocation. For those working in the Off-Broadway and festival theatre space, AMT is familiar ground, and the support infrastructure of working in a dedicated Off-Broadway house rather than a rented or ad hoc space is a meaningful logistical advantage. The October-to-November production window places the run squarely in the heart of the fall theatre season in New York, which is a competitive but active time for audiences and industry attention alike.

Given the genre and format, the production will need a strong musical director and music team, a choreographer if the staging demands movement work, a costume designer with an eye for period-contemporary realism (2020 is recent enough to be specific but immediate enough to carry emotional weight through clothing and detail), and a lighting and sound team capable of supporting both the intimate family drama and the larger emotional peaks of a full musical. Stage management will be central to coordinating a cast that, by the multi-generational family description, is likely to be sizable. With casting currently underway and production still nearly a year out, now is exactly the right time for actors to submit and for above-the-line collaborators to make contact.

ProductionList.com carries the full listing for Loving This Year, including production contact information, office details, and scheduling updates as they are confirmed. If you are a performer, music director, stage manager, or production collaborator working in the New York theatre space, this is a project worth pursuing now rather than waiting. New musicals with festival ambitions and Off-Broadway homes fill their creative teams early, and the most valuable opportunities on a production like this one are the ones you pursue before the cast and crew list is already locked. Check the full listing at ProductionList.com and make your move.

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