Pleasingly folksy, but a little light on 9/11 anguish

Come From Away

‘Welcome to the Rock if you come from away” chorus the townspeople of Gander, Newfoundland, at the start of Come from Away. The sentiments are simple, the accents strikingly Irish, the music pleasingly folksy.

The amazing welcome the denizens of this remote spot off the Atlantic laid on for thousands of distressed passengers, stranded after the closure of American airspace on September 11 2001, is almost the stuff of legend. Fair play to Canadian married duo Irene Sankoff and David Hein for revisiting this week of friendship and faith in lifeaffirming song and dance.

Their musical phenomenon – which opened on Broadway in 2017 – has now landed in London with a British cast. It would be a curmudgeon who didn’t greet it with respectful admiration but, much as I consider its non-stop evocation of that rather surreal episode inspiring and even stirring, there’s a glossiness about it that smooths over the upset of that era-defining event.

What with the joyful, celebratory tone, we’re almost in the realm of the tourist-board advert. And the show only just sidesteps the sense that it’s foregrounding traveller inconvenience and drink-fuelled bonding while giving the anguish stirred up by the atrocities a back-seat.

Amid the carousel-blur of the ensemble’s scene-setting, there are some stand-out vignettes of searing depth and detail, including a proud pilot (Rachel Tucker’s Beverley, pictured) reflecting on how her soaraway career path has become tainted by association. Worth a gander then, but a generation on from 9/11 maybe it could do with more of the grim wider context and a greater inkling of the dread beneath the defiance.