Sydney Reviews

The review pages of this journal are usually devoted to Australian performers at the highest level of professionalism, who can rightly be described with that overworked cliché, redolent as it is with the cultural cringe of bygone eras, as “World Class”. And this is absolutely as it should be. Musicians, actors and singers who dedicate their lives to the furtherance of the peaks of world culture, often embracing extreme financial hardship in the process, need and deserve the analysis and praise of such pages.

It is also true that amateur theatre productions, and amateur concerts, are often pretty difficult to sit through. But when a completely amateur outfit like the Bangalow Theatre Company mounts a production as coherent, as tight-knit, as vibrant as is their Come from Away, using all the varied though partial talents of their cast and fusing them into something that is far more than the sum of its parts, then one can truly say that amateur performance is the life-blood of our culture. These are not only grass-roots – there is an abundance of flowers too.

From the very opening number, We are here, I knew we were in for something special. The chorus work is simply stunning. The work of the production team, headed by the director Kate Foster and the musical director Margaret Curtis, but also including the brilliant work of movement director Sher Manu, was so tight, so arresting; and it spoke of countless hours of well managed rehearsals. I should also mention the sound manager, Glenn Ward, who in the first minutes of the play put to rest that awful fear that the sound systems of amateur theatrics will somewhere go terribly wrong. He seamlessly co-ordinated the band, placed high above the stage on a narrow balcony, with the action. He knew exactly how to balance the spoken dialogue over the music background, which is almost continuous in this show, so that, despite the speed of the dialogue and the various accents that were in play, the text was completely followable.

A bit of background might be in place here, since many of my readers may be unfamiliar with this play, or the story on which it is based, as I was. It draws on events immediately following the plane crashes of 9/11. About an hour after the planes hit the twin towers, American airspace was closed, and all inbound international flights that were in the air at the time were diverted to airports outside the US. 38 of the flights from Europe were diverted to a large airport in Gander, Newfoundland. The show Come from Away, by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, deals with the experience of almost 7000 passengers who found themselves for five days in a completely unknown destination, a town whose population totalled only 9000. It ran for 5 years on Broadway, from 2017 to 2022 (yes, through Covid!), but is virtually unknown here in Australia.

These passengers go through various turbulent emotional states as they try to get hold of their situation. They are not even allowed off the planes for over a day, during which time they have no idea of why they are there. When they get off the planes, even before they discover what has happened, the first thing they want to do is make contact with relatives, business colleagues, all the bits of their lives that their planes were to have involved them with. The townspeople put them up in a school, then in their homes. They all go to church, where two Jewish people sing a chant, three muslims pray on mats, and they all bury their differences. There is a brilliant scene in a pub when improbable friendships develop, in the heterotopia in which the passengers find themselves – “They are Here!”. When they finally are allowed back on the planes, some of the passengers are actually reluctant to go. And 10 years later, a large number of those who were stranded in Gander went back there for a reunion!

There are no leading roles in this play. Rather, it is an opportunity for a series of cameos from the actors, all of whom played multiple roles. These cameos result from somewhat caricatured versions of national stereotypes, a theatre practice that is several centuries old and includes the Commedia dell’arte tradition which also imbues, for example, Mozart’s comic operas. There is even a swaggering Spaniard, played by Jason Murray to roars of laughter from the audience. There is a nervous, emotionally crippled Englishman, played by Chris Catherwood, and a southern belle from Dallas, played by Shelbie Stuart, who with the wildest improbability (but it did happen!) end up getting married. There’s an American, played by Thomas Leigh, who is frightened of being shot by the locals until he realises they actually want to help.

The pilot of a flight from Paris, one of the first female pilots in the US, has a lovely aria, engagingly sung by Jessica White. Michael Barton makes a very good ageing local mayor. There’s a gay couple, both called Kevin, a businessman and his “sexcretary”, who are vegetarians. One of the couple, played by Callum Voller, also played an Egyptian cook who is looked upon with great suspicion by the other passengers and the townspeople as someone from “The Middle East”, but even he is eventually embraced by the community in their communal act of endlessly generous hospitality.

One of the townspeople, played by Leah van Ewuk, single-mindedly cares only for the animals on board the planes. And Finja Mierau, as Hannah, sings movingly about her uncertainty of the fate of her son, who she eventually discovers is a victim of the bombing. All these varied cameos deepened the different realities of the characters in way masterfully co-ordinated by the director, Kate Foster and the producer, Chelsea Thomas.

In case eyebrows are raised at the extreme unlikelihood of all this, I must tell you something I have just been told. In the audience for the show last night was a man who was actually among the 7000 people stranded at Gander airport after 9/11. He adored the show, embraced the cast afterwards – and if anyone’s testimony is worth anything, it is his. He lives in Mullumbimby, a village near Bangalow in the Northern Rivers of NSW.

Truth is sometimes very considerably stranger than fiction.