Come From Away

About This Event

On September 11, 2001, when U.S. airspace shut down, 38 planes carrying 6,579 passengers and crew got diverted to Gander, Newfoundland — a town of about 10,000 people that nearly doubled in size overnight. What happened next is the whole show: locals fed, clothed, housed, and entertained total strangers for the better part of a week with no idea when the airspace would reopen.

Writers Irene Sankoff and David Hein, a husband-and-wife team, flew to Gander in 2011 on the tenth anniversary of the attacks specifically to interview both the townspeople and the stranded passengers who'd returned to visit. Unlike most based-on-a-true-story musicals, they built the show directly from those real accounts rather than smoothing them into composite characters — the modest, we-just-did-what-anyone-would-do tone of the piece comes straight from how the Gander locals actually talked about it.

It won four Olivier Awards in London, including Best New Musical, and the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical on Broadway out of seven nominations. This Marriott Theatre run is a regional production of a show whose signature move is making a 9/11 story feel like an argument for decency instead of another retelling of the day itself.