TAKE IT ALL IN The hottest, coolest shows that make Connecticut theater tickets a must this season

The 2019-20 Connecticut theater season, which begins this month and ends mid-summer of 2020, spans several hundred events at dozens of venues large and small, shows that run from a single night to more than a month. You’ll need to pace yourself if you want to take it all in, and we know it can be overwhelming, so we’ve distilled all the theatricality so all you have to worry about where to sit. satire for our times. And it’s an ideal show to kick off a new age of community and creativity at Hartford Stage.

Melia Bensussen was named the new artistic director of Hartford Stage in January and had a hand in crafting about half of the theater’s 2019-20 season. We won’t be able to see Bensussen’s talents as a director until May, when she helms a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Connecticut-set comedy “Ah, Wilderness!” (Excellent choice!)

But she’s putting her stamp on the place immediately by helping bring in a provocative, socially relevant new comedic-drama-with-music “Quixote Nuevo” by revered playwright Octavio Solis, directed by KJ Sanchez.

Set on the Texas border, this modern update of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” is a shared production with two other major regional theaters, all of whom were taken with its timeliness and clamored to have it. Hartford gets it first, Sept. 19 through Oct. 13.

Bensussen has expressed her wish of increasing the theater’s outreach to Hartford’s Latinx community, and she’s wasting no time. “Quixote Nuevo” looks to be grabby, earthy and wild. It talks tough about immigration, racism, academic elitism and social injustice, with jokes and music.

Also at Hartford Stage this season: the hit modern-parenting drama “Cry It Out” (Oct. 24 through Nov. 17); Nilaja Sun’s latest one-woman show “Pike St.” Jan. 9 through Feb. 2; Elizabeth Williamson’s new adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” (Feb. 13 through March 15); and the return of former artistic director Michael Wilson, directing the stage version of “The King’s Speech” (March 19 through