Review: KC Rep's COME FROM AWAY at Spencer Theatre

Kansas City Repertory Theater’s new production of “Come From Away” is top notch in every possible way. “Come From Away” is about how one remote Canadian town rallied in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America to embrace neighbors they could not have imagined they shared on the day before.

This is not my first experience seeing or reviewing “Come From Away.” I vividly recall being positively impressed by the first ever Broadway tour to come through Kansas City in 2019. I responded especially to a pre-show invitation to meet with retired American Airlines pilot Beverley Bass on whom the one of the most conventional life characters was based.

This current KC Rep production opened slightly before the 25th anniversary of the attack and runs past through the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that brought down New York’s World Trade Center. The KC Rep production of “Come From Away” absolutely measures up to the 2019 touring production and, in many ways, excels beyond that very good rendition. 

Is it possible that a quarter of a century has passed since the terrorist attack that changed America in so many ways? The changes it wrought for all of us makes it seem at the same time much closer and much further away.

Gander Newfoundland was home to a touch less than 10,000 people in 2001. Owing to an accident of geography, Gander sits at the easternmost point in North America on the Great Circle Route that once represented the shortest practical air highway between North America and Great Britain.

During the World War II years, and for a generation thereafter, the Gander International Airport served as an important waypoint for most aircraft making transatlantic crossings. Few planes could then make the crossing with a full load of people, cargo, and fuel without stopping at Gander for a gas fill-up before venturing across the sea.

At Tim Horton’s famous Coffee Shop in Gander, Tuesday, September 11, 2001, it began like many others. Ordinary people started their ordinary days in a relatively remote town on an island in the north Atlantic.  Gander town fathers met to drink coffee, gossip about work, and complain about the threat of a school bus drivers going out on strike.

But earlier that morning, four commercial jetliners were hijacked by seventeen Islamist terrorists with the intent of crashing them into important buildings in New York and Washington.  Three of the four stolen aircraft hit their targets.

The twin World Trade Center Towers held offices and records of many of the nation’s top financial firms.  Within hours, the buildings collapsed in an unbelievable catechism of fire and concrete.  Two-Thousand-Fifty-Three American lives were wiped out within hours of the first crash including Four-Hundred-Twenty-Four first responders. The rubble smoked and emitted toxic fumes for at least another three and a half months.  

Meanwhile, a third passenger plane flew into the south facing outer ring of the nation’s military operations center at the Pentagon killing an additional One-Hundred-Eighty-Four people. A fourth passenger jet headed for Washington crashed into a farm field in Pennsylvania due to the heroism of the forty-four passengers and crew who resisted being used as propaganda tools and weapons of war. Whether that fourth plane was aimed at The White House or the U.S. Capitol is still unclear.

It became at once clear that America was under attack as sure as it had been under attack in 1941 at Pearl Harbor Hawaii.  There was no way of knowing what was coming next. U.S. airspace was closed.  All airplanes headed for America were instructed to land at the first practical airport. 

Thirty-eight long range jumbo jets with almost seven-thousand souls on board ultimately landed and parked at Canada’s Gander Newfoundland International Airport for no one knew for how long.

The population of Gander exploded from about ten thousand to seventeen thousand in a moment.  Mayor Claude Elliot wisely declared a state of emergency.  All hands-on-deck!  The threatened bus driver strike was put on hold for now. It was an emergency that would last five days.

The people of Gander stepped up and dug in. Out of nothing, our neighbors to the north magically accommodated their seven thousand visitors who had “Come From Away.”  They used cots and mats for beds, fed them in buffet lines, listened to their concerns and fears, pressed the local hockey rink into service as a makeshift refrigerator, opened their homes for showers, made their extra bedrooms available to visitors, and made friends that will last their lifetimes.

It would be impossible to show all the little acts of compassion and kindness during a difficult week under stress conditions.  These playwrights (Irene Sankoff and David Hein) have chosen a clever, unusual, and effective manner to tell the Gander story.  They have created an ever more complex framework of twelve actors standing in for the seventeen thousand with few recognizable lead characters and with everyone doubling and tripling in brass.  “Come From Away” is as much an ensemble piece as was Michael Bennet’s “A Chorus Line.”

A person who was a lead actor suddenly becomes a chorus member in the next section, and the action rotates on and on.  The setting is an empty airline hangar, two airplane stairways on castors and a number of chairs.  A distinctive bit of costume or a light cue or a change in accent is all that is needed to move on.   

The audience instinctively understands that a certain arrangement of the chairs means we are on an airplane.  Another arrangement is the community center buffet. Another arrangement becomes a place for Beulah (Val Fagan) to listen, worry with, commiserate, and encourage Hannah (Bethany Thomas), the Mother of a New York Firefighter gone dark since the attack. Another arrangement allows for a clandestine romance that may not have blossomed in any other circumstance.   

What follows could easily have become an exercise in theatrical sentimentality. Instead, Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s compact musical finds humor, fear and remarkable generosity in the true story of strangers thrown together by history.

The true burden that allows for the KC Rep production of “Come From Away” to become GREAT falls on director Stuart Carden and choreographer Marc Wayne.  The level of detail planning and precision staging required for this kind of show is immense.    Carden and Wayne have jointly created a plan that this cast has clearly embraced and feels confident with.  It comes through as infectious enthusiasm on stage.  Casting is key to success.  Everyone must perform at star level.  They do. 

Every cast member gets the chance to shine and has to for the complete show to succeed. Mayor Claude (Russell Konstans) is excellent throughout, but we first get to know him with “Welcome To The Rock” as the show begins.   Nick (Cody Proctor) and Diane (Julie Shaw) shine with their romantic ballad “Stop The World.” Beverley (Lauren Braton) blows away one of the more traditional musical laments with “Me & The Sky.”  Hannah (Bethany Thomas) prays “her firefighter son has survived the pile at Ground Zero.

The passengers arrive frightened, confused and largely unaware of what has happened. Cellphone service is unreliable. Television reports are fragmentary. Some travelers cannot speak English. Many fear for relatives in New York and Washington. All have suddenly lost control of their lives.

The people of Gander respond by opening schools, churches and community halls. They gather blankets, prepare food, fill prescriptions and provide telephones. Local residents surrender their showers and spare bedrooms. When frightened animals are discovered aboard the planes, they care for those as well.

The score draws heavily upon the Celtic musical traditions of Newfoundland. Fiddles, guitars, whistles, accordion and percussion create an infectious rhythmic energy. The musicians frequently seem less like an accompanying orchestra than a particularly accomplished local band invited to join the gathering.

Most of the evening belongs to the ensemble. There are no traditional leading roles and relatively few opportunities for performers to stop the show in search of applause. Characters and stories overlap as the production moves rapidly from one experience to another.

The production occasionally presses its emotional points more firmly than necessary. The audience understands early that generosity can flourish during catastrophe, and the musical sometimes repeats the lesson. Its relentless pace also leaves some characters more sharply sketched than fully developed.

Running about 110 minutes without an intermission, “Come From Away” moves with the efficiency of a well-edited newspaper account. A small ensemble portrays dozens of characters, shifting identities with little more than a hat, jacket, altered posture or change of accent. The transformations occur in full view of the audience, reinforcing the production’s central idea: These people may come from different countries, cultures and circumstances, but they share far more than they initially realize.

“Come From Away” plays at the Spencer Theatre on the UMKC campus through September 20. Contact the ticket office at 816.235.2700.  This is a show so exuberant that at conclusion the audience gives it cheers more than applause.  Make it a point to relive our recent history and see what a little kindness can look like.

Photography by Don lpock

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