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Come From Away - From 9/11 to Broadway to Your Screen
September 14, 2021Today we're speaking with the creators of "Come From Away," the Tony Award-winning Broadway show, and the latest to get a streaming release, this time on Apple TV+. Joining us are the creators and writers of the book, music, and lyrics, David Hein and Irene Sankoff, and director Christopher Ashley.
The show is set in the week following the September 11 attacks and tells the true story of what transpired when 38 planes were ordered to land unexpectedly in the small town of Gander, Newfoundland when the US unexpectedly closed its airspace. The characters in the musical are based on real Gander residents as well as some of the 7,000 stranded travelers they housed and fed.
If this sounds like a big story, that's because it is. And just how do you pare that down into a tight, Broadway show, with no intermission? It was a challenge:
The musical premiered on Broadway in 2017 and was nominated for seven Tony awards, including Best Musical, Book, and Score, and Christopher Ashley won the Tony for Best Direction.
I feel like one of the first questions you ask about a musical or a film or a play is, "who's the lead?" And ["Come From Away"] doesn't have one. It's got twelve actors playing hundreds and thousands of people. So its emotional event is so spread out. But one of the things we do have that kind of replaces that is the delight of twelve actors transforming. And you come to know those twelve, even despite the fact that they're gonna play many different parts. So the pleasure in theatrical and acting transformation gives us a lot of juice that you wouldn't have with just a lead. And also, there's no villain! But everybody does have this shared trauma around 9/11, if you were old enough to have lived through it. And how you deal with that trauma turns out to be the problem that everyone's trying to solve.
Christopher Ashley, Director, "Come From Away"