Come from Away

11 September 2001. America closes its airspace and the planes in the air have nowhere to land. Thirty eight of them are directed to Gander in Newfoundland, in northeastern Canada. The town has about nine thousand people and close to seven thousand passengers come down. Nobody knows what has happened; the passengers are held on the planes for hours and the news arrives slowly. The town opens its schools, cooks, hands out medicine. For five days two groups of people live in the same place. Then the planes take off again. Christopher Ashley directs; he directed the musical on stage as well. Jenn Colella, Joel Hatch, Tony LePage and Caesar Samayoa are in the cast. The book, music and lyrics are by Irene Sankoff and David Hein. This is not a film; it is a live recording of the musical as staged on Broadway. The recording was made in May 2021 at the Gerald Schoenfeld theatre in New York; the audience in the house included survivors of 11 September and health workers from the pandemic. It went out on 10 September 2021, timed to the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the attacks. There are twelve performers and all of them play both the townspeople and the passengers; the changes are made on stage, by changing a jacket. The matter it treats is hospitality; the film is not about the disaster but about the everyday order built the day after it. The narrative does not make everything pleasant; racial suspicion and tension are on stage too. Its limit is form; this is a record of theatre, there is no film language, and the staging is not arranged for a screen. Who it is for: viewers who like musicals and narratives drawn from real events. Who it is not for: it is a stage recording, the emotional dose is high, and the songs resemble one another.