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The blockbuster Canadian musical Come From Away, playing at the Jubilee until Sept. 22, wears its big, warm welcoming heart on its sleeve.
It’s a genuine crowd-pleaser as it tells the story of how an outpouring of love, kindness and friendship resulted from an unthinkably horrific act of hate.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks forced 38 planes carrying almost 7,000 passengers to land in Newfoundland’s Gander airport, almost doubling the population of the town, and forcing the locals to become caretakers for five days. With music, lyrics and story by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, it manages to overflow with sentimentality without ever becoming maudlin, eliciting tears of empathy and joy. The genius of Sankoff and Hein’s collaboration is they create, in just under 100 minutes, a host of locals and stranded visitors we care about. Poignant and lasting relationships develop, love blossoms for some and fades for others, and people’s lives are changed forever.
The music, with shades of Riverdance, is rousing, heartfelt and heartening. Welcome to the Rock, the opening number is so energizing you’ll be forced to stop your feet from tapping along. Prayer, a song about faith in the face of adversity, is inspirational, and Something’s Missing, the song after the planes finally leave, is sweetly poignant. Addison Garner, who plays Beverley Bass, the first female pilot for American Airlines, treats Me and the Sky as a powerful torch song, while Hannah-Kathryn Wall, who plays a New Yorker whose firefighter son is missing, turns I Am Here into a ballad filled with tender longing.
The songs in Come From Away serve the play, revealing characters, advancing the plot and creating emotional arcs. Unlike the songs that Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Webber and Rice wrote for their musicals, the songs of Sankoff and Hein do not have a life outside the show. You’ll love them as you sit in the theatre, but you’re not likely to be singing them in the car on the way home.
Christopher Ashley’s direction, recreated for this tour by Daniel Goldstein, is a marvel of ingenuity and imagination. He has a dozen actors play at least four times as many characters simply by changing a hat, jacket, scarf, accent or physicality. It’s like a magic act constantly unfolding.
What Ashley does with a dozen chairs, a few tables and limited props is also astonishing. One minute he has us in a local coffee shop or bar, and, with just a shuffling of the chairs, he has us in the planes. Most remarkable is a scene on a clifftop during the budding romance between a British man and a Texan woman. They are standing on the tables, but when they walk back down to the town, the rest of the cast keeps moving chairs to form a pathway. It is pure theatrical wonderment.
Toni-Leslie James’s costumes are deceptively creative. They may look as if they’ve been picked out of someone’s closet, but they make the characters look so real, and yet they are highly functional in their ability to transform the actors so quickly and credibly.
The choreography by Kell Devine, recreated by Richard J. Hinds, is robust and enlivening, always speaking volumes about Newfoundlanders and their spirited love of life and camaraderie.
The cast is an impressive ensemble, working like a well-tuned machine, but are each given moments to step out and shine.
Nick Berke, as one-half of a gay couple, is a joy no matter which character he inhabits, but when he shows how this New Yorker is won over by the locals to the detriment of his relationship, it’s authentic and moving. Kathleen Cameron as Bonnie the SPCA worker who becomes a nursemaid to cats, dogs and even monkeys, brings so much humour to the show. Kristin Litzenberg and Wall play women whose sons are both firefighters and form a bond that is as believable as it is heart-wrenching.
The full house at the Jubilee stood, clapped, stomped and cheered their appreciation, and then gave the eight-member, on-stage band a prolonged ovation, recognizing how essential they are to this production’s success.