Come From Away lands seven Tony nods
NEW YORK — The Canadian stage production has received seven Tony nominations including a nod for best musical.
The show’s creators, Canadian husband-and-wife team David Hein and Irene Sankoff, were also nominated for best score and best book for a musical, while Christopher Ashley is up for best musical director.
Jenn Colella is in the running for best actress in a featured role in a musical for her portrayal of reallife retired airline captain Beverley Bass.
Howell Binkley was also nominated for best lighting design in a musical and Kelly Devine was nominated for best choreography in a musical.
is set in the remote East Coast town of Gander, N.L., during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Gander’s population doubled as it sheltered 6,579 passengers and crew from 38 planes diverted when U.S. air space was closed on Sept. 11, 2001.
earned mostly rave reviews when the production made its Broadway debut in March. Before its arrival in New York, the musical was staged in La Jolla, Calif., Washington, D.C., Seattle and Toronto. The
cast was also in Gander for two concerts last October as a fundraiser for local charities.
has had its fair share of high-profile attendees in the audience since its Broadway opening. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, former prime minister Jean Chretien, actor Hugh Jackman, actress-model Brooke Shields and supermodel Cindy Crawford are among the famous theatregoers who have visited the Great White Way to take in the show.
Before Tuesday’s Tony nominations, the homegrown production was already receiving plenty of recognition from critics within and beyond the Big Apple.
The show has received a slew of theatre nominations from the Drama League Awards, Drama Desk Awards, the Outer Critics Circle Awards and the Chita Rivera Awards.
The show also received 14 nominations from the Helen Hayes Awards, which celebrate excellence in professional theatre throughout the Washington metropolitan area.
Kevin Spacey will host the 71st annual Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York on June 11.
LYNN ELBER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES — A tearful Jimmy Kimmel turned his show’s monologue into an emotional recounting of his newborn son’s open-heart surgery — and a plea that all U.S. families get the lifesaving medical care they need.
“It was a scary story and before I go into it, I want you to know it has a happy ending,” Kimmel assured ABC’s
studio audience Monday as he detailed how his son’s routine birth last week suddenly turned frightening.
Several hours after his wife, Molly, gave birth April 21 to William John, a “very attentive” nurse at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center alerted the couple and doctors to the baby’s purple-ish colour and an apparent heart murmur, the host said.
The baby’s lack of oxygen was either due to a lung problem or, worst-case scenario, heart disease, Kimmel said, and it was determined to be a heart problem.
“It’s a very terrifying thing,” he said. He was surrounded at the hospital by very worried-looking people, “kind of like right now,” he told the audience, one of the jokes he managed despite choking up and having to pause at times.
A sonogram showed his son was born with holes in the wall separating the right and left sides of the heart and a blocked pulmonary valve, Kimmel said. The baby, nicknamed Billy, was taken by ambulance to Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles to undergo surgery to open the valve.
“The longest three hours of my life,” Kimmel said.
Billy will have another openheart surgery within six months to repair the openings and then a third procedure when he’s a young teen, but he came home six days after the surgery and is “doing great,” Kimmel said. He shared photos of him with his wife, their two-year-old daughter Jane and a smiling Billy.
After thanking by name the nurses, doctors and staff at the two hospitals, along with his colleagues and friends — “Even that (expletive) Matt Damon sent flowers,” Kimmel said of his faux rival — the comedian then gave an impassioned speech on health care.
He criticized U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health and praised Congress for instead calling for increased funding.
“If your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make . ... Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right?” he said.
Washington politicians meeting on health care need to “understand that very clearly,” he said. Partisan squabbles shouldn’t divide the country on something “every decent person wants. We need to take care of each other.”
Kimmel said he would skip the rest of this week’s shows to be with his family while guest hosts take his place.
He was joined Monday by Dr. Mehmet Oz, who was a previously scheduled guest but jumped in to offer an illustrated description of Billy Kimmel’s heart problem. Also on the show at Kimmel’s request was Shaun White, the Olympic gold medal snowboarder who discussed overcoming the same heart defect as Kimmel’s son.