9/11 musical shines on the small screen
“You would have done the same,” the residents of Gander say.
It’s mere days after Sept. 11, 2001, and the people of this small town in Newfoundland have just absorbed 7,000 stranded airline crew members and passengers — people from all over the world who had been headed all over the world, but definitely not to this dark, rocky island that happens to have a huge airport. The Gander residents have collected clothing, blankets, tampons. They’ve made sandwiches and hosted cookouts. They’ve hosted the “plane people” in their homes.
The true story is the subject of “Come From Away,” the gorgeous Irene Sankoff and David Hein musical set to be released Friday, Sept. 10, on Apple TV+ as a filmed version of an onstage performance at Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.
But on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, as American troops have withdrawn from Afghanistan, leaving catastrophe in their wake, abandoning some who aided the U.S. military effort, that reassurance from Gander residents — that we would have done the same for them had they been the ones in need — feels increasingly wishful.
To see “Come From Away” onscreen now — directed by Christopher Ashley, who won a Tony Award for his Broadway direction of the show — is to see a path to mercy and compassion off in the distance and wonder if we can still get there, or if it’s too late for us.
Sankoff and Hein interviewed residents, passengers and crew members to write the show, and the exquisite details that made it into the book and lyrics show big heart and a judicious storytelling eye. There’s Gander constable Oz Fudge (Paul Whitty) who, behind a gruff exterior, is so nice he issues warnings instead of speeding tickets. There were the hours when, before passengers were allowed off the planes, they
cycled through all the in-flight movies, including, disastrously, “Titanic.” There’s the moment that bus driver Garth (Tony LePage) communicates with a couple (De’Lon Grant and Q. Smith) who don’t speak English by pointing to a passage in their Bible.
If you usually see musicals from the back of the second balcony, the camera uncovers a whole new layer of meaning. You can see the worry lines on actors’ faces. You can see the deep care they put into listening to their scene partners. You can see the private moments of joy and whimsy they steal. You can see that when SPCA worker Bonnie (Petrina Bromley) tries to comfort the animals stuck in cages on airplanes, she tries to channel her whole being to them through her eyes.
Cast members’ singing voices could almost de-age you. Smith, as a mother worried about her New York firefighter son, makes every note into an event and a prayer. Jenn Colella, as American Airlines pilot Beverley Bass, is equally at home in an otherworldly flutter and an earthy belt, with expert understanding of when to deploy each register. LePage’s pure tenor could change the weather.
There’s nothing especially artful about the camerawork here. You might feel a bit as if you’re watching a pro football game, with high-level cameras reeling back and forth on cables above the line of scrimmage. It’s earnest and dutiful filming, but nothing that could replace the craftsmanship of in-person theater. That moment, say, when the whole theater darkens and Ashley makes all the characters into pilots just by pointing small blue handheld lights in front of actors’ faces just doesn’t have the same magic on film.
In that way, the film of “Come From Away” might offer a model for how digital and in-person theater can coexist: how one might whet the appetite for the other, how TV might broaden the reach of an essential story at the moment we most need it.