Christopher Ashley won the 2017 Tony for Best Direction of a Musical for Come From Away, which dramatizes the 38 real planes diverted to Gander, Newfoundland after 9/11.
The Broadway production closed in 2022, so New York isn't where to catch it now — a national tour and licensed regional productions are the more realistic options.
Irene Sankoff and David Hein went to Gander in 2011, on the tenth anniversary of the diversions, and spent close to a month recording residents and returning passengers. The book, music and lyrics are all theirs, and a great deal of the dialogue is drawn from those interviews. The underlying event is a matter of record: under Operation Yellow Ribbon, 38 aircraft carrying roughly 7,000 people were put down at Gander International Airport, in a town of comparable size, and stayed for the better part of a week.
Twelve actors play everyone. The switch between islander and passenger is made in full view by adding or removing a jacket, and the show never pauses to explain who is now speaking. It runs without an intermission. The band plays on stage in Newfoundland folk instrumentation — fiddle, bodhrán, accordion, whistles, and the percussive stick that local players call an ugly stick — and the score is closer to a kitchen party than to a Broadway pit.
The production reached Broadway by an unusually long regional route: Sheridan College in 2013, then La Jolla Playhouse and Seattle Repertory Theatre in 2015, Ford's Theatre in Washington and the Royal Alexandra in Toronto in 2016. It opened at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in March 2017, drew seven Tony nominations and won one, for Christopher Ashley's direction. It closed on 2 October 2022 after 1,669 performances.
A musical about 11 September sounds like a category error, and the show's answer is to stay on the ground in Newfoundland and never depict the attacks at all. Its best-known number is not about that day; it is a pilot's account of a career spent proving she belonged in the cockpit. The subject is what a small place did with a week of unasked-for guests, and the show is careful enough to include the suspicion and exhaustion alongside the hospitality.
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Come from Away is a 2013 musical, with book, music and lyrics by Irene Sankoff and David Hein. It is based on the events in the Newfoundland town of Gander during the week following the September 11 attacks, when 38 planes, carrying approximately 7,000 passengers, were ordered to land unexpectedly at Gander International Airport. The characters in the musical are based on actual Gander residents and the stranded travelers they housed and fed.
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