GANDER, N.L.—During the week of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, when his small Newfoundland community welcomed the world, Ryan Alexander was only eight: too young to know what was happening, but old enough to sense that something had.
He remembers being sent home early from school that fateful Tuesday, when the terrorist attacks shuttered U.S. airspace and grounded planeloads of passengers in Gander. He recalls the strangers from around the world who disembarked those planes and filled the quiet residential streets. But most of all, Alexander remembers returning several days later to his elementary school, Gander Academy, and seeing the messages scrawled on the chalkboards, written by some of those “plane people” hosted at the school by his neighbours, watching and waiting as the horrors unfolded.
“We’ll never forget being here,” Alexander recounts the contents of one note, from a New Yorker. “Thank you for your kindness.”
Alexander grew up and became an actor, leaving Newfoundland to pursue a professional career in the U.K. But this summer, he’s returned home to star in a historic production of “Come From Away,” the acclaimed Canadian musical that dramatizes the events from that week, which he lived through more than two decades ago. Playing at the Joseph R. Smallwood Arts and Culture Centre through September, it marks the first time a fully staged “Come From Away” has been mounted in the province.
For Alexander, who plays bus driver Garth, being in this new production is perhaps one of the most indescribable of full-circle moments.
“I’m using the word ‘surreal,’ but I don’t think it quite captures it,” he told the Star. “For me, these aren’t characters, but actual people I’ve grown up with.”
The Gander, N.L. airport sign, now famous thanks to the Broadway musical “Come From Away,” is seen through the fog from inside the airport in July, 2023.
THE CANADIAN PRESSDirected by Newfoundlander Jillian Keiley, the production is the town’s largest theatrical event ever. So far, the eight-week engagement has been such a triumph — tickets were sold out before rehearsals started — that producers say the show will return to town next summer, with casting and on-sale details to be shared shortly.
That “Come From Away” is so successful in Gander should come as no surprise. The Tony Award-winning musical broke box office records in New York City and spawned replica productions around the world.
Today, it’s easy to take the show’s success for granted. But its journey to success was never a sure bet: it bore an obscure title, featured no stars and was written by a Canadian couple whose previous credit was a ɫɫ Fringe Festival show. Its hopeful story, of how kindness can persist amid unimaginable darkness, was dismissed by some. Others called it the “9/11 musical.”
But “Come From Away” proved the cynics wrong, soon becoming known as the “little show that could.” And now, in many ways, for the writers, producers and some of its original cast members, that winding journey feels finally complete, as “Come From Away” is welcomed back to the Rock, the very place that inspired its story.
The operation was code-named “Yellow Ribbon.” Roughly 33,000 passengers on more than 200 passenger planes were diverted to airports across Canada following the Sept. 11 attacks.
It was Gander, however, a small town of 10,000 residents, that felt the most significant impact. Its airport, previously a large refuelling hub for transatlantic flights, received 38 planes and roughly 7,000 passengers, nearly doubling the town’s population overnight.
When theatre producer Michael Rubinoff heard of Gander’s story, on the one-year anniversary of the attacks, he knew immediately it was meant for the stage.
“It couldn’t leave my mind of the potential of what this could be,” recalled Rubinoff, then a law school articling student who also produced theatre.
But it took years for him to find others who saw it the same way. Rubinoff approached five teams of musical theatre writers. Each turned it down.
Then, in 2010, he met David Hein and Irene Sankoff. The married couple had just finished a run of “My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding,” a hit Fringe musical co-written by the pair and based on Hein’s family.
Michael Rubinoff was instrumental in bringing the concept of “Come From Away” to the stage.
ɫɫ StarRubinoff saw the show after it was picked up by Mirvish Productions and later met Sankoff and Hein for dinner. He mentioned his idea as an afterthought at the end of the meal. Sankoff and Hein were intrigued, he recalled, and, unlike others, said they’d look into it.
Several months later, on the 10th anniversary of the attacks and exactly nine years after the idea for “Come From Away” took hold in Rubinoff’s head, Sankoff and Hein arrived in Gander — with a Canada Council development grant, pens, paper and recorders in hand, ready to start writing what would become their “little show that could.”
Small details scattered throughout the region serve as reminders of the events that unfolded here some 22 years ago.
At the airport’s international lounge — perfectly preserved from the 1950s — a small exhibit recounts the stories of the “come from aways.” Outside Gander’s town hall rests a disfigured piece of steel from the World Trade Center, donated to the town from New York.
These features aside, Gander and its neighbouring towns are perfectly unremarkable, seemingly no different from the dozens of other communities that interrupt the vast expanse of Newfoundland’s wilderness.
This easygoing humbleness is evident not just in the sights around town but also in its people. Talk to any Ganderite on the street and they won’t easily admit that what they did the week of Sept. 11, 2001 was anything out of the ordinary.
It’s probably why so many of the locals were wary when Sankoff and Hein came knocking on their doors, wanting to turn their stories into a stage musical.
Bonnie Harris, who works at the local SPCA, didn’t make too much of it when she spoke with the pair, sharing her story about how she cared for the numerous animals stuck on the grounded planes.
Irene Sankoff, left, and David Hein are a married writing team responsible for book, music and lyrics for “Come From Away.”
ɫɫ Star“I thought it was going to be a high school musical that sort of fizzles out after a while,” she said.
Behind the scenes, however, the work continued. “Come From Away” was the first musical mounted as part of Sheridan College’s Canadian Music Theatre Project, an incubator created by Rubinoff.
After more writing and rewrites, the show was picked up by commercial producers and premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, Calif.
No one knew how audiences would receive the show.
“But when the lights went down,” that first night, recalled original cast member Astrid Van Wieren, “there was silence for a second, and then you could hear everybody standing up, clapping and cheering.”
Gander and area SPCA manager Bonnie Harris, who rescued animals from the cargo hold area of a plane diverted to her town during 9/11.
ɫɫ StarAs “Come From Away” wound its way around the world, the dream was always to bring it back to Newfoundland. But the small size of Gander’s 400-seat theatre made it impossible to fit the original staging.
So, even before the musical closed on Broadway, the show’s creators and producers knew Gander would be the site of “Come From Away’s” first non-replica North American production.
The task of reimagining the musical for the Gander stage ultimately fell to Keiley, the acclaimed Newfoundland director who recently completed a tenure as artistic director of English theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
“To be able to take it home is so moving to me,” said Keiley, who remembers watching the musical’s first workshop production at Sheridan College and marvelling at the “extraordinary feat.”
Central to Keiley’s vision is a sense of community. The set, designed by Shawn Kerwin, features square quilts created by the people of the province. “The Warm Embrace” project aimed to solicit some 200 quilt squares from the community. In the end, the production was sent more than 2,200.
For Sankoff and Hein, mounting this production here feels like bringing “Come From Away” back home. They recall the generosity of the town when they were welcomed, in 2011, on their research trip to Gander.
It echoed the way the “come from aways” were welcomed that night in September 2001.
“The people were so generous with us, not just with their stories, but also with putting us up in their homes, feeding us and screeching us in,” Hein said. “So to do a full production here has always been the dream. And to do it in a way that is reimagined through a Newfoundland lens and by Newfoundlanders … how could it possibly be better?”
Joshua Chong is a ɫɫ-based staff reporter for the Star’s Express Desk. Follow him on Twitter:
Astrid Van Wieren in “Come From Away.”
Chris Crockwell
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