A special visit by ‘come from aways’
Actors from the Toronto musical visited Gander for their first time
They came, they saw, they kissed the cod.
While the hit musical “Come From Away” is set in Gander, N.L., and the airspace above it, some of its cast members had never visited the remote Newfoundland community. This was recently remedied after a weeklong concert staging of the show in St. John’s, made possible by a gap in Toronto performances as the show moved from the Royal Alexandra to the Elgin Theatre.
In their final days in Newfoundland, the cast went to Gander, visiting several sites and meeting with people who are represented in the show and others there who lived through the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The concert showings were a way for the people of Newfoundland to enjoy a now world-famous production that celebrates their hospitality and culture: “Come From Away” is based on the real-life testimonies of locals and visitors (in Newfoundland parlance, “come from aways”) who were thrown together when 38 planes were grounded in Gander following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
“It was an inspiring and overwhelming, humbling experience,” says James Kall, who plays characters including Nick and Doug in Come From Away (all the actors take on multiple roles). “We arrived at night on a bus and it was like a lyric in the show, all you could see was ‘darkness and trees.’ I was thinking about the people who arrived there in 2001: what it must have been like to not know where you were, maybe not even speaking the language, driving into the darkness.”
After such solemnity came revelry: at a local bar, the cast was “screeched in” — the Newfoundland custom of drinking local hooch and kissing a fish, which is featured in one of the production’s most boisterous musical numbers. “Our friends were there,” says Hamilton native Kristen Peace, who plays Bonnie and others in the show. “We had a night of being goofy and having food and drinks and laughing.”
By friends, Peace means some of the people she and her castmates play, with whom they’ve developed ongoing relationships. She got to spend time at the screech-in with Bonnie Harris, who manages the Gander SPCA and whose character is focused on the animals in the holds of the grounded planes. “She and I talk, not just about the show or what happened,” Peace says. “We are similar people, we just talk about life and animals … Bonnie is just Bonnie, full of love.”
Like Kall, Peace had never visited Newfoundland before this trip and says it lives up to its reputation for “shockingly beautiful” scenery. The group enjoyed some unexpectedly sunny weather after having experienced significant delays getting out of Toronto during the big snowstorm on Jan. 20.
This ended up being “great research” for the show, jokes Barbara Fulton, who plays Diane and others. “We were not able to leave (Pearson Airport) for hours … we were sitting on the floor, hanging out, going to the bar.”
This was Fulton’s second visit to Gander, having visited last Labour Day with her sister, who lives in Halifax. Like her castmates, she describes this trip as a combination of the festive, the informative and the solemn.
As part of their tour, they visited the Derm Flynn Riverfront Peace Park in Appleton, named for that town’s former mayor, who is a character in the show. The centrepiece of the park is a piece of metal from the Twin Towers, which Fulton describes as “disturbing, how bent and horrible it is.”
Visiting Gander Airport, the group had a tour of Nav Canada, the company that owns Canada’s civil air navigation service. It was a chance to see “how air traffic control actually works, to think about what they were going through on that day,” Kall says. The company was in charge of guiding more than 200 planes through Canadian airspace, including the more than three dozen that landed in Gander.
Later, at a gala dinner, Kall says he was “seated with a gentleman who was working at the airport at the time and was in charge of finding parking places for 38 planes. They only had three rolling staircases … he was choreographing everything.”
Lisa Horner, who plays Beulah and others in the Toronto show, highlights the dinner as a welcome opportunity to sit down with the people who lived what she and her castmates act out. “When you’re onstage as an actor, you’re distanced” from the experiences you’re representing, Horner says.
Horner visited Gander in September 2018 with Astrid Van Wieren, who plays Beulah and others on Broadway. On that visit they spent time with the two women who inspired their central character, Beulah Cooper and Diane Davis, calling it the Beulah Bonanza Trip to Bountiful. “I had started to feel like a fraud, “Horner explains. “Not a lot of actors get to visit the places they represent onstage. I had that opportunity and I took it.”
While it’s only been a few weeks since their recent visit, the actors think it will have lasting effects.
“I didn’t expect to get emotional,”
Peace says. But then someone pointed her to correspondence that the Sept. 11 visitors sent to their hosts in Gander after returning home: “Binders and binders and binders and books of letters and cards and pictures,” says Peace. “It just really hit me … you know it’s something special when you see the physical manifestation of human kindness and the good it does. That really got me.”
“I don’t think it’s changed my performance, but I feel far more grounded,” Kall says. “Not that I was faking it before, but the trip brought that next level of reality to the storytelling.” He describes the short trip as illustrating the “juxtaposition between the tragedy of those days and the joy that was brought about by the kindness of the community.”
“Now that I’ve gone I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone quite like Newfoundland people,” Horner says.
“They’re intelligent and open-hearted .... Their vibe is fantastic.”