Come from Away: May it stay forever!

Come from Away (2021) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated TV-14, for dramatic intensity

Available via: Apple TV+

By Derrick Bang

Oh. My. Goodness.

 

This Irene Sankoff/David Hein stage production isn’t merely an electrifying experience; it’s also a badly needed reminder that kindness still exists in this world.

 

As the reason for their unscheduled landing in Newfoundland becomes clear, four plane
passengers — Kevin J (Caesar Samayoa), Diane (Sharon Wheatley), Hannah (Q. Smith)
and Kevin T (Tony LePage) — express their anxiety and fear in a song.

Its filmed arrival was deliberately timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of 9/11, given that the play illuminates a quite unique incident — 1,100 miles from New York City — that unfolded over the course of several days immediately following the terrorist attacks.

This riveting production is more than a mere musical; it’s quasi-opera, in the mold of Les Misérables or Hamilton, with only brief bits of dialogue interspersed between patter-song storytelling. Plans for an actual film adaptation were scuttled by COVID-19 — and the Broadway production was suspended after March 12, 2020, for the same reason — so the original Broadway cast gathered for a one-off performance this past May in the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater; that was filmed in place of the intended big-screen version.

 

(I figure if James Whitmore can snag an Academy Award nomination for 1975’s Give ’em Hell, Harry! — essentially just a film of his one-man stage show — then I’m entitled to treat Come from Here as a movie.

 

(Besides which, this is must-see viewing.)

 

The staging is cleverly bare-bones, with little more than chairs and tables hastily rearranged, often mid-song, to convey a café, a meeting room, the rows of seats in a plane or bus, and any number of other interiors immediately recognized via context. Everybody in the impressively versatile 12-member cast plays multiple roles, often switching in the blink of an eye, although each actor also has one “core” character.

 

Which means that the actors also switch nationalities and accents in the blink of an eye. (Think about bouncing back and forth between that adorable Newfoundland brogue and something else.)

 

The production is rigorously faithful to actual events, with many characters based on actual people, and in some cases even an actual person. One key character, Beverley Bass, truly was the first female captain of an American Airlines commercial plane.