Come From Away prepares to land in Toronto
Actors, crew excited to tell story from Canadian cast as it returns to city Feb. 13
It’s particularly fitting for Eliza-Jane Scott to play Beverley Bass, the pilot portrayed in Come From Away who flew one of the planes forced to land in Gander, N.L., when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks closed U.S. air space, stranding 7,000 passengers.
Scott has played two other female aviators, Amelia Earhart and Christa McAuliffe, the civilian astronaut aboard the doomed Challenger space shuttle that exploded in 1986.
“I have flyers in my family. My mother’s a flyer,” added Scott, known for Degrassi: The Next Generation. “When she was pregnant with me, that’s when she got her private licence and my brother owns a flight school in Kingston.”
Scott was one of the Canadian cast members of Come From Away meeting the media Thursday as rehearsals begin for the hit musical’s return to Toronto, beginning Feb. 13.
“This is a story that started here in Canada and it’s a Canadian story we’re telling,” said David Hein, who co-wrote the show with spouse and long-time collaborator Irene Sankoff. “To bring it back home where it was developed with the support of our friends and our family, and to be telling a Canadian story with an allCanadian cast . . . is a dream come true.”
The show was workshopped as part of Sheridan College’s Canadian Music Theatre Project before getting its professional debut at the La Jolla Playhouse in California in 2015.
It made its sold-out Canadian debut at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in November 2016 before opening on Broadway this past March, where it’s still attracting standing-room-only audiences.
Scott says she loves the fact “that (Bass) has broken all the boundaries as a female flyer, the first female captain in history at American Airlines.
“She came up through the ranks and had to fight a lot of challenges along the way.
“So there’s a definite feminist empowerment theme in her character. I don’t know if they expected it when they first created it, because it was all about 9/11, and finding a way to take that tragedy and find the good in it.”
Director Christopher Ashley has his own connection to the events depicted in the musical; he was living in New York when two planes brought down the World Trade Center towers on Sept.11, 2001, as were Hein and Sankoff.
“We all bonded together and we all took care of each other. Everyone had different experiences and different worries that they were bringing to the moment,” Hein recalled.
Ashley joined Hein and Sankoff when they went to Gander on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks to conduct research for the show.
“The people themselves are extraordinary, funny and great storytellers. They’re really modest. As we were talking about wanting to tell the story, they were saying, ‘Please, you would have done the same thing,’ ” Ashley recalled.
“I think I gained five pounds in a week being there because they’re constantly feeding you.” “We didn’t know what we were looking for when we went out to Newfoundland,” Hein added. “We heard hundreds of stories of kindness and each one was better than the last one, and we couldn’t wait to share them with the world.”
Ali Momen, who plays Egyptian passenger Ali, saw some of the show when Hein and Sankoff first workshopped it at Sheridan in 2012.
“I thought, ‘This is incredible.’ I felt like I was actually in a Newfoundland kitchen party. I thought, ‘This has a lot of promise’ and when the show kind of blew up . . . there was no question I wanted to be part of it,” Momen said.
Momen had to fly from Berkeley, Calif., to Toronto, where he was in a show, to audition for Come From Away.
“I had to literally fly in after an evening show in California, do an audition and then fly out. But I knew I was going to do it. I just knew I wanted this part so much and I knew I was right for it,” he said.
The cast also features theatre vets Stratford veterans Lisa Horner and Barbara Fulton, Young People’s Theatre regular Saccha Dennis, opera and musical theatre performer George Masswohl and former Canadian Idol finalist Steffi DiDomenicantonio, as well as James Kall, Cory O’Brien, Kristen Peace, Kevin Vidal and Massachusetts-born Broadway actor Jack Noseworthy.