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On August 3rd, 2017 I left my hotel and strolled down 7th Avenue through the ever-bustling Times Square, where the homeless and mentally unstable street-hawkers dressed as Spider-man, dancing baby, and the Statue of Liberty were joined by countless topless women with their breasts painted in the American flag, all of them trying to coerce the thousands of passer-by’s to take their photo, for a fee of course.
Fortunately this was not my destination. I have enough pictures of myself standing next to deranged people, thank-you very much. No, I was headed for Broadway!
I had tickets for the new runaway hit Come From Away that had recently won Best Musical, a warm & fuzzy feel-good musical about the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
If that sounds unlikely, I guess it’s fair to point out that Come From Away is less about the attacks themselves than it is about the unbridled kindness of the people that live in (and around) Gander, Newfoundland. If the story isn’t famous yet it soon will be (because of this musical), but here ‘goes:
In the earlier days of aviation airplanes couldn’t hold enough fuel to get all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, so all transatlantic flights had to stop in Gander, Newfoundland for refuelling*. As a result, Gander has a much, much bigger airport than is necessary for its 8,000 residents, regardless of how isolated they town is. I’ve visited the Gander Airport a couple of times and I can tell you, we’re talking a big airport here. It was once the largest airport in North America. It was one of the few airports in the world that was big enough to qualify for emergency Space Shuttle landings for crying out loud. By the late 1970’s aviation technology had developed enough to allow airplanes to make the ocean jump without having to stop to refuel, and the traffic in and out of Gander airport quieted down significantly. But it’s still an active airport, and it’s still really, really big.
Fast-forwarding to 2001, when US airspace got shut down on 9/11 thirty-eight planes carrying 7,000 passengers and crew (and more than a few animals, including a pregnant bonobo monkey) were diverted to Gander, virtually doubling the town’s population in one unsuspecting day. After sitting on the tarmac for hours, the frightened and confused ‘plane-people’ emerged from the airport to find a community of unnervingly friendly people ready to dig in and do whatever they could to help.
And that’s what Come From Away is about.
Nevermind that Newfoundland is my favourite place in the world and where I hope to live one day**, nevermind that the previous summer I had visited Gander and interviewed people about precisely this event for an episode of my still-defunct travel program Earth Beat, nevermind that the musical shines an envious, glowing light on merely being Canadian…all that aside Come From Away is simply the greatest Broadway show ever.
Okay, what do I know? I’ve seen, what…maybe five musicals before this? and I didn’t really enjoy any of them. And actually, only one of them was even really on Broadway so I’m certainly not experienced enough to know what I’m talking about when it comes to Broadway musicals, but like any good critic (or most anybody, really) I’m not going to let that stop me.
To be honest I thought I didn’t really like the medium…maybe I just wasn’t a ‘musicals’ kind of guy, but Come From Away proved me wrong. Now I can honestly say that I love musicals, so long as they are Come From Away. I laughed, I cried, I conquered.
If you were from Newfoundland or – dare I imagine it, the town of Gander – you would’ve walked out of the Schoenfeld Theatre feeling twenty feet tall after seeing this show. And you know why? Because the show shows Newfoundlanders being Newfoundlanders, and when put on display – perhaps especially in a gritty, empathy-averse place like New York – it shows that Newfoundlanders being Newfoundlanders are simply The Greatest People you’d ever want to meet.
Go ahead, deny it. If you even try I’ll know that you’ve never been there.
I read one review of Come From Away that was fairly critical. Basically the reviewer couldn’t believe that such a place could exist, and poked fun at the hokey concept of some ever-helping open-armed Utopia such as the one depicted in the show.
Clearly, Mr. Grumpy Reviewer has never visited The Rock.
(I was bicycling across Newfoundland in 2005 and got a flat tire eighty kilometres from St. John’s. A guy picked me up in his brand-new pickup truck – he had literally driven it off the lot just the day before – and gave me a ride to the city. Along the way he had to stop to pick up his paycheque. He parked in a no-parking zone and left the truck idling. “I’ll just be a few minutes,” he said before strolling across the street and into an office building. If leaving a stranger in control of his new truck wasn’t enough, when the guy returned he insisted I borrow his truck to go get my bicycle tire fixed; in the end I declined. In my experience that kind of courtesy is not at all a rarity in Newfoundland.)
No matter how you think about it, this musical had a very real chance of being a major flop; like on the level of ridicule. But not only is it far enough removed from the attack itself physically – the musical is set thousands of kilometres away from where any of the planes were crashed – it also rides just the right line of respect while it tells some really touching stories.
The fact that it does so with just twelve cast members doubling and tripling down and playing approximately forty roles, a set that is almost barren aside from a dozen chairs and a couple of tables, and music that is good but not at all the focus of the work, really puts the focus on those poignant tales, of which there are many.
The bottom line: If you haven’t seen it yet, go see Come From Away.
*Because of the mandatory stopover an endless list of celebrities have spent time in Gander. Queen Elizabeth, Fidel Castro, Albert Einstein, Frank Sinatra…’matter of fact Gander, Newfoundland is where The Beatles first touched down in North America.
**And now I do. Sometimes dreams come true.
Todd Man Out 
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