It won’t take more than the opening number in Northern Stage’s exciting production of Come From Away for most viewers to feel magic at work. The musical unleashes everything live performance can do in sound, motion, space, story and song. Twelve actors become a vast crowd of people; 12 chairs become a plane, a school, a bus; 12 voices become an orchestra of humanity.
Director Carol Dunne and choreographer Kyle Brand give viewers an ever-changing vantage point on the true story of some 16,000 people caught in one of the shock waves of 9/11. When the U.S. closed all airspace after the al-Qaeda attacks, pilots were directed to land immediately, and 38 planes were diverted to an airport on the Canadian island of Newfoundland. These planes contained about 7,000 passengers with plenty of cultural and language differences.
In Come From Away, the Gander airport is very large, while the town beside it is small — rustic small, two cops small, good manners small. The 9,000 residents immediately take it upon themselves to accommodate the grounded passengers. What the townsfolk call the “plane people” will need food, places to sleep, clean clothes and showers. Mostly, they’ll need a warm welcome, and the Newfies of Gander proceed to offer it.
This story of helping hands is told through a chorus of voices. Irene Sankoff and David Hein, the Canadian wife-and-husband team who wrote the show’s book, music and lyrics, create astonishing blends of sound to convey both calm and chaos. Early on, the ensemble speaks the simultaneous garble of pilots and air traffic controllers. Isolated voices bring us back to the tragedy and uncertainty of that September day.
Sankoff and Hein based their story on actual residents of and visitors to Gander. The authors can be accused of giving us little more than their research notes because they stuff in dozens of characters with no time for depth. But in Northern Stage’s production, these people become pieces of a mosaic.
When it opened on Broadway in 2017 and became a surprise hit, Come From Away was also criticized for being either too sweet or too soon. Dunne’s production, which fits a huge story into an intimate space, is a good deal more than a message of hope. It’s about being lost in a crowd, then found.
All the instruments of theater are at work. Harmonies rise to the roof; lighting intensifies every mood; choreography transforms space and emotion. The live music, punctuated by pipes and fiddle in a six-piece band, trots with a modern indie twist on Irish trad. The characters are oversimplified but shine bright, like faces in a crowd. And voices emerge from darkness.
“Tom, is that you?” a mother asks. “Tell the kids I’m fine,” a pilot says. A rising tide of overlapping speech carries the small messages that thousands struggled to send and receive on 9/11. Later, those voices will lift in prayer to different gods with the same simple plea. And after being stranded for several days, a chorus of angry voices will clamor as impatience, fear and discomfort overwhelm the stranded travelers and the people trying to help them.
Virtually every song is a full ensemble number, a story happening to everyone. The performers are superb singers, and the sound mix brings the main vocals forward against a supporting choral background, all draped over the band’s rolling beats and figures. Sonic dimension is the show’s hallmark.
The 12-person cast handles approximately 80 roles, some of them meaty but most mere postage-stamp portraits. The small ones are all the more engaging for the quick-change transitions. At a time of crisis, all the characters are coping with what it means to be a stranger, to be trusted or mistrusted. The entire company is constantly transforming to become a world of people who don’t know each other.
Among many roles tackled by the first-rate cast, Nicole Michelle Haskins and Lisa Karlin offer moving solos; Benjamin Howes and Susan Haefner play a surprise love story; J. Bailey Burcham is an outgoing cop and a shy rabbi; Annie Torsiglieri is a voice-of-reason townie and out-of-control passenger. Kate Budney and Serena Brook juggle comic roles while Albert Jennings and Kevin David Thomas portray a gay couple whose bond breaks. Tom Ford is both narrator and mayor, and Darius Wright, as a wary New Yorker, discovers how kind strangers can be.
The musical turns facets of chance meetings into an image of what it feels like to plunge into a crowd. A silly ritual in which everyone gets drunk and some plane people are proclaimed honorary Islanders could be unbearably cute, yet it captures the reckless abandon people feel in groups. And a scene of anxious passengers walking in the dark toward the unknown shows how fear makes everyone feel alone.
Dunne keeps the production tonally perfect, moving confidently from light to dark and never blurring the two. Sorrow and fear emerge often, but running jokes and exuberance predominate. The creative team contributes innovative lighting, clever costumes and a versatile set that depicts an airplane hangar where ever-shifting chairs can convert into anything, from a backyard to a chapel to a classroom.
The ensemble tunes that often combine spoken and sung lines make the musical feel like one continuous song. Characters who flicker rapidly still leave an impression, deep in an experience that will change them.
The musical runs its feel-good throttle wide open, down to stitching a slightly desperate finale from postscripts on how the characters fared 10 years later. But the power of Come From Away is in the different voices, accents and languages that become a stirring multitude.
Come From Away, book, music and lyrics by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, directed by Carol Dunne, produced by Northern Stage. Through October 26: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7:30 p.m.; Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. (noon on October 16); and Sundays, 5 p.m., at Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction. $28-100.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Happy Landings | Theater review: Come From Away, Northern Stage”
