Contributed photo
From the Shubert production of Come From Away.
A bus driver has brought a busload full of stranded airline passengers to a camp in Newfoundland, in the middle of the night. The passengers don’t really know why they’re there, and many of them are scared. When they arrive at the camp, the first passengers in line don’t want to get off the bus, and they don’t speak English. The bus driver doesn’t know how to get through to them. Then he notices that one of them is holding a Bible, and he knows his Bible. He flips the pages to Philippians 4:6: “Be anxious for nothing,” the verse begins. He points to the page. The passengers read it, and understand.
“And that’s how we started speaking the same language,” the actors address the audience.
Come from Away — the deeply humane musical about what happened when 38 international flights landed at Gander International Airport in Newfoundland after U.S. airspace was closed in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — kicks off the Shubert Theatre’s 2023 – 24 Broadway season. It’s a tremendous start to what looks to be a season jammed with hits, from Chicago (Dec. 7 – 10) to Company (Jan. 31-Feb. 4) to Annie (Feb. 29-Mar. 3) to Hadestown (Apr. 30-May 5) to Stomp (May 31-Jun. 1), with plenty of shows in between, including the Dance Theatre of Harlem, A Christmas Carol, and Randy Rainbow (visit the Shubert’s website for a full listing of its upcoming shows).
It’s fitting that the season begins with a show like Come from Away, as a welcome back to the Shubert this season. The show is improbable — and improbably moving — in several ways. As the Toronto Star reported in 2016, “who would have thought you could create an uplifting musical out of the existential horror that was Sept. 11? Lawyer Michael Rubinoff did,” and this “seemingly bad idea” turned out to be anything but.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Rubinoff had heard of the story of how the passengers from 38 planes were stranded for days in the tiny town of Gander in Newfoundland, how the local residents opened their homes to them, and how, years later, the passengers never forgot that kindness. Rubinoff had a theater background and felt sure the story could somehow be turned into a musical. He spent years looking for a writing team that shared his vision. In 2009, he found it in David Hein and Irene Sankoff, who were coming off the heels of a show called My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding. Hein and Sankoff headed to Gander, where they interviewed townspeople and gathered hundreds of personal stories. On the tenth anniversary of the event, many of the people who had been stranded there returned for a celebration, which led to more interviews, and more stories. They developed the show in Canada. Its U.S. break came in 2013 when the Goodspeed Opera, in East Haddam, showcased it in a workshop program. From there, it wended its way to Broadway, where it opened in 2017, becoming a critical and commercial success.
As a story, Come from Away works its power by foregoing many of the usual ways true stories are turned into fiction. It revels in the truthful details. Instead of creating a couple fictional protagonists, we meet a dozen characters, most of them based one-to-one on their real-life counterparts, with only a few liberties taken. Among the stranded passengers are a Texan woman and an English man who meet on one of the planes, American Airlines’ first female flight captain, a gay couple, and the mother of a New York City firefighter, desperate for news about her son. Among the Newfoundlanders are the mayor of Gander, the police chief, a schoolteacher, and a volunteer at Gander’s SPCA who’s married to an air traffic controller. All of their stories and more interweave and build on one another. As U.S. airspace remains closed and days pass, connections are made. Tenuous bonds form and strengthen. Tensions rise, too. It all culminates in a big party. And then U.S. airspace reopens, the passengers resume their journeys. They fly back to their lives, and the residents of Gander resume theirs. But nobody is ever the same.
The general arc of the story isn’t what matters. What matters is what each person does within it, how they give and receive help, how they deal with the hardships in front of them. This makes Come from Away a true ensemble piece, as the 12 cast members — Kathleen Cameron, Danny Arnold, Addison Garner, Hannah Kato, Jason Tyler Smith, Andrew Hendrick, Shawn M. Smith, Stanton Morales, Trey DeLuna, Candace Alyssa Rhodes, Kristin Litzenberg, and Molly Samson — each have one or two primary characters to play, plus a handful more. The musical is one act, almost entirely sung through with snippets of rapid dialogue. Timing, and fast timing at that, is everything. The gentle comedy of the everyday at the play’s very beginning, the dislocation that follows, the poignancy and humanity and sparks of hope in each of the small stories, must be conveyed in a split second. This cast nails it all, so that the moments of sadness and beauty, despair and compassion, ripple fast over the audience. The effect is intense; around this reporter, several people cried, cathartically, through the entire thing.
The whole that the cast weaves out of many is cemented by the music, which is omnipresent and something of a character in its own right, especially when the band members — Harry Collins, Logan Mitchell, Gioia Gedicks, Azana Hightower, McKinley Foster, Isiah Smith, Spencer Inch, and Brandon Wong — intermingle with the cast during the party scene. As with the characters and dialogue, the music is drawn from reality; it’s redolent of the traditional music of Newfoundland, from its instrumentation to the structures of the melodies and harmonies to the emotions they evoke: big, strong, one part sadness and three parts joy.
It all adds up to a deeply resonant and powerful theatergoing experience, amplified by being in the same room, seeing it live. If anything, the show might hit harder now than it did when it first opened. Since then, national politics has only grown more vicious, the social forces that divide us have only become stronger. In the face of that, Come from Away helps remind us that what really matters are the people around us, within arm’s reach, and the ways we can and do help each other all the time, not only in moments of crisis, but in the everyday, too. Now as then — and as before then — the amount of harm a small number of people can inflict can be shocking. But thousands of tiny acts of kindness can add up to something, too, and to those who take part in it, it can matter more.
Come from Away runs at the Shubert Theatre through Nov. 11. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.