One of the great things about people is that they can be super-generous and show great humanity during times of strife. Take a gander at the Canadian town of Gander for example.
Back on September 11 in 2001, when planes were hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and The Pentagon in Virginia, the airspace over North America was closed and all other planes were grounded.
As a result, the town of Gander in Newfoundland suddenly found itself playing host to a lot of unexpected visitors, with no departure date in sight.
With all airborne planes forced to land at the nearest airport and inbound flights from Europe diverted to Canada, a total of 38 planes carrying 6,579 people - and 19 animals - touched down in Gander, almost doubling its population.
Locals there call visitors or non-natives as 'come from aways' and welcomed this sudden influx with open arms. They were fed, clothed, housed and entertained until aircraft were again allowed to fly.
This remarkable true story is the inspiration for Come From Away, a musical by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, who aren’t just married to each other, they’re also married to the world of musical theatre.
After taking off in their native Canada, the show opened with great success on Broadway in 2017 and subsequently took up residency at London’s Phoenix Theatre two years later. It’s also won a pile of awards.
Now, Come From Away is on tour and will run at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre from Tuesday June 11 to Saturday June 22, so Irish audiences can experience the joyous story - and soaring music - as complete strangers come together and forge friendships that will remain for a lifetime.
These are stories that combine to create a true celebration of hope, humanity, and unity, so it’s no surprise when I click on to my Zoom meeting with the show’s New York-based creators, Irene Sankoff and David Hein, they’re all smiles and welcomes.
John Byrne: Hi folks. Great to talk to you about your show. I believe you guys have been together since your student days - can you tell me a bit of your own back story?
David: We met on the first day at university, at York University in Toronto. We were dating for two years and eventually figured it out that we liked each other
Irene: We were both studying theatre, and then I left theatre . . . My point is that we never knew that we would end up working together. But we did know we’d end up dating for a couple of years.
David: I got a degree in Set and Lighting Design, Irene has a degree in Creative Writing and Psychology. Then she got her Masters in Acting, down in New York. I came down and followed her, because I was in love with her, and worked at a Muppet recording studio dong music for Muppets and Disney, apprenticing there.
So we were here for 9/11, we’re in New York right now, my cousin was in the Towers but fortunately got out. And a lot of what inspired Come From Away was our experiences living here in New York, because we lived in an international residence with people from 110 countries from around the world.
All taking care of us, all knocking on our door that morning, playing music for us and all waiting for news.
Years later, we decided to start writing together - particularly because, between day jobs and night jobs, we never saw each other - and we wrote a musical just to spend the summer together, hanging out.
Irene: Instead of having a baby, we made a musical. And then we had a baby when the musical was successful.
David: Our first musical was My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wicked Wedding, which is about my mom. It got picked up by the biggest Canadian producer and suddenly we had to quit our day jobs and we were together all the time. That was in 2007 and Come From Away is our second show.
And Come From Away has been quite a success story, hasn’t it?
Irene: It’s done alright for us, yeah!
David: It’s pretty amazing. We really expected that Canadian high school students would be forced to do this show - and that would be the extent of its success.
But at the same time it’s this incredible story about kindness, and about generosity ism the fact of darkness. And it feels like it’s never gotten old since we first heard the stories up to now.
It’s remarkable in some ways - and then again not. Generally speaking, most people are good people. But it is an exceptional story. How did you hear about it?
Irene: A gentleman named Michael Rubinoff was starting something called the Canadian Theatre Music Project and he came up the concept. He had seen My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wicked Wedding and took us for dinner. What he didn’t tell us was that five other teams had turned him down.
David: They all thought it was a terrible idea - but we didn’t!
Irene: We were so focused on what was happening where we were, that we didn’t know much about what had happened there. We knew they had taken planes and stuff, but we didn’t know the full extent of what happened.
Gender is definitely the most extraordinary story because it’s just the amount of people with the amount of resources, and how that town made those resources stretch. They couldn’t include everything but they stretched to the breaking point.
Stuff was starting to break down. That town was not built for that many people.
It’s amazing that the town’s population virtually doubled overnight, and everyone just tried to carry on as if they’re used to having a massive influx of people.
Irene: Exactly!
David: What’s unique about it is it has this gigantic airport, which was used in World War Two as a launcher for Allied aircraft. So it had a huge airport, but not a huge town next to it.
And so it could take a lot of airplanes, whereas some other towns could have fitted all the passengers in their hotel rooms, Gander only had 500 hotel rooms. And the planes had over 7,000 passengers.
Irene: And they had to keep those hotel rooms for the crews. Because, if they didn’t, they couldn’t fly.
So you’ve obviously got thousands of stories to choose from here. How did you narrow it down?
David: Some of them we would amalgamate, other times we created composite characters, and that was just to make a legible story. We’d a lot of women named Diane and a lot of men called Kevin. It just got confusing.
Sometimes we would just include things like a reference to a pharmacist who was filling orders from all around the world in a million different languages - just to try and fit that story in. It was all about how we could fit 16,000 stories in as tight as possible.
There are some that we couldn’t fit in. We also have a show called Cut From Away that we’ve done, which consists of songs and stories that we weren’t able to fit in.
Come From Away is at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre from Tuesday June 11 to Saturday June 22 and tickets are on sale through Ticketmaster.
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