Review: COME FROM AWAY at Moonlight Stage

There is something particularly moving about a show that reminds us that helping people does not require a grand gesture, a famous name or a billion-dollar bank account. Sometimes it just requires looking at a plane full of strangers and saying, “How can we help?.”

That is the beating heart of Come From Away, the Tony-nominated musical now playing at Moonlight Stage through Sept. 26. While the story takes place in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, this is not a musical about the attacks themselves. It is about what happened afterward.

When U.S. airspace was closed that morning, planes carrying nearly 7,000 people were diverted to Gander, a small town in Newfoundland, Canada. Over the next several days, the residents of Gander and surrounding communities fed, clothed, housed, and cared for thousands of people they had never met. 

Written by Canadians Irene Sankoff and David Hein, Come From Away was born at La Jolla Playhouse in 2015 before moving to Broadway, where it ran for years with one pandemic break in between. Created based on interviews with Gander residents and some of the stranded passengers, the musical has the unusual quality of feeling both like a polished Broadway show and a collection of stories someone might tell you over coffee.

Moonlight’s production is directed by San Diego resident Geno Carr, who was part of the original La Jolla Playhouse and Broadway casts and performed Gander police chief Oz Fudge.. Working with musical stager Melissa Glasgow, Carr embraces the show’saesthetic with humor and heart while putting the storytelling squarely in the hands of the performers.

Come From Away looks deceptively simple. It is not. The 12-member ensemble performs a sung-and-spoken narrative that has them changing characters, costumes, and accents and back again on a Canadian dime. They sing, dance, play percussion, and shift between Newfoundland, New York, Texas, Los Angeles, Britain, and beyond, sometimes within the same breath.

The impressive part is that it rarely feels like a technical exercise. Instead, the ensemble sustains an air of improvisational urgency that feels exactly right for a story about people making do in a crisis. Carr also wisely resists lingering over its more obvious moments of heartbreak and humanity and trusts the stories to land on their own.

Bryan Barbarin, Gerilyn Brault, Nancy Snow Carr, Lena Ceja, Berto Fernández, Jason Guffy, Lulu Lloyd, Anthony Methvin, Kürt Norby, Meghan O’Brien Lowery, Erin Vanderhyde and Eli Wood make up an exceptionally strong ensemble. It is difficult to single out individual performances because the real magic comes from how seamlessly they work together.

They are matched by an excellent eight-member onstage band, led by music director and conductor Randi Rudolph. The Celtic/folk inspired score, featuring strings, Irish flutes, pennywhistles, bodhrán and Newfoundland ugly stick, gives the show its distinctive musical personality. The technical work by Andrew G. Hammer (scenery), Jennifer Edwards (lighting), Janet Pitcher (costumes) and Ryan Marsh (sound), with Joel Goldes as dialect consultant, supports the storytelling and world-building.

 Come From Away is a show about the ripple effect of kindness. You do not have to save the world to make a difference. Fred Rogers famously told us to “look for the helpers.”  Perhaps that is why this particular musical continues to feel so welcome: In a world that can sometimes feel determined to remind us of everything that divides us, Come From Away is two hours honoring those who did exactly that.

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