The hit Broadway musical Come From Away will return to the DC area at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater from December 10 through January 5. The show was nominated for seven Tonys—including Best Musical—and won for Best Direction of a Musical.
Come From Away tells the true story of what happened when 38 planes were ordered to land on 9/11 in the tiny Canadian town of Gander, Newfoundland. The townspeople work together to figure out how to feed and shelter 7000 new people while everyone reckons with the horror of the terrorist attacks. Relationships develop and break down, and all parties emerge changed from the experience, working together to understand a rapidly evolving world.
The Broadway version, which is still playing to standing-room-only audiences, recently became the longest-running Canadian production on Broadway. After debuting in Ontario, the show had runs in San Diego and Seattle before coming to Ford’s Theatre in fall of 2016, where it was positively received by packed houses. At the time, the Washington Post’s Peter Marks described the show as “heartwarming and eager to please” and said the score has “an infectious, gritty vitality.”
But by the time it opened in New York, in early 2017, the election of Donald Trump and the subsequent conflicts over mistreatment of immigrants, some critics found a somewhat different takeaway—even as they gave the play similarly glowing reviews. “We are now in a moment in which millions of immigrants are homeless and denied entry to increasingly xenophobic nations, including the United States,” wrote the New York Times‘ Ben Brantley. “A tale of an insular populace that doesn’t think twice before opening its arms to an international throng of strangers automatically acquires a near-utopian nimbus.”
DC is one of the longest engagements for the show’s national tour; tickets start at $49 and can be purchased at the Kennedy Center website.
Jane is a Chicago transplant who now calls Cleveland Park her home. Before joining Washingtonian, she wrote for Smithsonian Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she studied journalism and opera.
