Review: Tony-winning ‘Come from Away’ offers a moving, much needed boost of nostalgia

Why do Americans so badly need the musical “Come from Away”? Not just enjoy it or respect its craftsmanship but need it, so much that the remaining seven shows at Belk Theater have sold out in “Hamilton”-style frenzy? (You may find turned-in tickets at the Blumenthal Performing Arts website.)

You could attribute this to the Celtic energy of the score, the zeal of a 12-person cast where everyone’s a talented ensemble player, imaginative direction in which the donning of a cap or the moving of a chair puts us in a different time and place. I think it’s nostalgia for the last time almost everyone in the world was on our side, when an outpouring of love reminded us how much people embraced the United States during an ordeal.

The people in this case were Canadians, the time was September 2001, and the occasion was the downing of the World Trade Center towers. The Canadian husband-and-wife team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein made their debut as composers-lyricists-book writers with this show, and director Christopher Ashley shaped it into a fast-flowing narrative full of touching vignettes. I can’t think of a musical since “Hamilton” that moved me more; “Dear Evan Hansen,” which took the 2017 Tony for best musical over “Away,” comes close. (“Away” won a Tony for best director of a musical, Christopher Ashley.)

We’re set down, as 6,600 unexpected visitors were, in Gander, Newfoundland, where air traffic controllers rerouted dozens of international flights after President George W. Bush closed U.S. airspace. We see compassion and confusion, as big-hearted residents of the town play host superbly over five chaotic days.

We learn just a bit about a handful of passengers who fall in and out of love or agonize over missing family members. A female captain recalls her successful fight to reach the cockpit in a sexist industry. Mostly, though, we watch human beings perform at their best under crisis and marvel at their tireless thoughtfulness.

Hein and Sankoff don’t sanitize the experience. They show passengers’ bigotry toward an innocent Egyptian who, in their minds, has suddenly become a menace. They suggest people in the United States would not have responded so selflessly, had Canadians been trapped here. (I don’t doubt that.) Small details count: When gleeful voyagers on a departing flight pass a hat for Gander residents, one man unobtrusively shakes his head. What happened to him, we wonder, that he missed the joyful experience his fellow passengers (and we) have had?

Songs and scenes

Ashley and the writers knit songs and scenes together so carefully that there’s no place for applause until more than halfway through the show, after the rousing number “Screech In.” It comes in a flood then from theatergoers who have been waiting to show their delight. When did you last see an entire Broadway Lights audience stick around through the exit music, played zestfully by the eight-person band?

Perhaps I’m prejudiced because I, too, was unable to come home from Canada after the 9/11 attacks. I was stuck in Toronto, a cosmopolitan center, but even there, people took time to console folks from south of their border.

A waitress, hearing my accent at breakfast the morning after the attacks, tossed free donuts into a paper bag on my way out the door. “We’re all Americans today,” she said, giving me a spontaneous hug. I wonder what would have to happen for our country to inspire that kind of feeling again.

This story is part of an Observer underwriting project with the Thrive Campaign for the Arts, supporting arts journalism in Charlotte.

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This story was originally published January 8, 2020 at 10:52 AM.