If you’re not familiar with the city of Colma, CA, it’s known as the “City of the Dead.” And for a good reason: Colma’s dead outnumber its living 1500 to 1. But, this post isn’t about the city of Colma (its history is pretty interesting though, and I just found a book by Michael Svanevik and Shirley Burgett titled City of Souls: San Francisco’s Necropolis at Colma that you may want to check out), it’s about Colma: The Musical, which, according to Philadelphia Weekly, “gets everything right that Garden State got wrong.”

Michael-Oliver Harding gives us a summary of Colma: The Musical here:

[Colma] follows the story of three best buds who live in a dead-end town — your archetypal dreary suburb, this one a short distance away from the cultural mecca of San Francisco — that serves as a burying ground for San Francisco’s dearly departed, to the extent where the dead outnumber the living 1,500 to one. Rodel, Maribel and Billy have just risen above the biggest teen hurdle of all — high school — and suddenly find themselves thrown into the limbo land of transient retail hell, pre-college anxiety, and the frightening independence that one acquires on the rollercoaster ride through early adulthood.

As the threesome, comprised of aspiring actor Billy, party crasher Maribel and straight-shooting queer Rodel, spend their last summer together living it up in Tombstone Central, they discover that their future plans aren’t nearly as compatible as they previously assumed, and that carving out one’s future takes willpower and a truckload of confidence.

I’m pretty sure, although not positive, that catching Colma at a film festival is currently the only way to view it.