Come from Away: Forging a Temporary Community

Jenn Colella (left) in Come From Away at Broadway's Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The enormously likable Canadian musical Come from Away, which recently opened on Broadway, dramatizes the role played by the citizens of Gander, Newfoundland, when American air space was locked down in the aftermath of 9/11 and nearly forty planes were rerouted to Gander’s small airport. (In the old days, we’re told, it had been a frequent refueling spot; airport personnel can recall crossing paths with Sinatra and The Beatles when their planes made pit stops there.) The locals reached out to seven thousand stranded strangers from all over the world – whose presence nearly doubled the population for five days – providing food and shelter and devising ways to communicate with those who couldn’t speak English. The most inventive, perhaps, is that of the bus driver (Chad Kimball) who notices that a distressed African couple are carrying a Bible. Though he can’t read the words, he has an intricate knowledge of scripture and he figures that chapter and verse are the same in all editions, so he finds an inspiriting passage to convey to them that they’ll be fine.

Irene Sankoff and David Hein, who supplied book, (folk) music and lyrics, are banal writers, but banality isn’t the worst of theatrical sins; emotional fakery is, and I didn’t detect any of it in Come from Away. The project itself may be sentimental in nature but the production, which was directed by Christopher Ashley, mutes the sentimentality as much as possible; it’s remarkably dry-eyed and its humor is wry and observational. When an Orthodox rabbi can’t eat any of the proffered food, and there’s no local synagogue to help him out, he’s set up in his own kitchen and invited to produce kosher meals – not only for himself and other Jews, but, as it turns out, for some Muslims and a gay vegetarian couple from L.A. The gay men, both named Kevin (Kimball and Caesar Samayoa), are hesitant to admit they’re a couple; they have no idea how redneck a small Maritime Canadian town might be. But when a few too many beers at a bar make them incautious, they’re amused to discover that half their fellow drinkers have gay relatives or friends and use that connection ingenuously to make the Kevins feel more at ease. Bob (Rodney Hicks), an African-American New Yorker, gets over his urban-bred paranoia when his host, the mayor of one of the nearby towns, encourages him to go from yard to yard borrowing his neighbors’ grills and finds that their owners are more than willing to part with them; in Bob’s words, they help him steal their own barbecues.

Memphis: A Musical for Its Time

The hit Broadway musical Memphis, which recently aired on PBS with its original cast intact, has an irresistible swing. Joe DiPietro’s book presents a simplified version of how rhythm and blues crossed over to attract white audiences in Memphis in the 1950s, with characters standing in for demographic groups and points of view. But you feel as you do at certain movies that dramatize key moments in the chronicle of popular music like American Hot Wax or Cadillac Records: the show gets it right emotionally even if you don’t buy it as history, and you get caught up in the visceral excitement of the subject matter. It does a hundred things wrong and still delivers an awfully good time.

Chad Kimball plays Huey Calhoun, a white ne’er-do-well who ventures into a black club in his home town in 1951 to hear up close the glorious music he’s been sneaking illicit listens to since he was a boy. There he discovers Felicia (Montego Glover), who looks like a black baby doll with bright button eyes and marcelled jet hair but sings gospel and R&B in an exuberant bourbon-and-molasses voice. Huey can’t hold down a job as a department-store stock boy (he gets distracted and breaks the merchandise) but when he convinces his boss to let him try out in the music department he causes a small-time sensation playing “race records.” The ones he sells to turned-on white customers are his own, of course; the store doesn’t carry music that isn’t white – and his employer is too scandalized to keep him on. But he talks his way into a DJ spot on a local radio station with a combination of sheer bravado and unarguable results: listeners who haven’t heard anything like the kind of music he spins keep calling in to request more. Eventually he gets the station manager (Michael McGrath), a pragmatist with a terrible sidewall haircut, to let Felicia perform one of her songs live on the air, and her brother Delray (J. Bernard Calloway), who owns the club where Huey first saw her, starts producing her records. But Delray has trouble warming up to Huey. When he and Felicia start a romance, Delray foresees trouble, and he’s right. Though they have to sneak around, mostly after dark, they aren’t careful enough, and the first act ends with redneck thugs beating both of them up in the street. (They aim the worst blows, administered with a baseball bat, at Felicia.) The second act finds Huey as the host of an American Bandstand-style local TV show that gets away with showcasing African American singers and dancers, and Felicia setting her sights on a crossover career in New York City, where she and Huey can live safer lives.

Summer Musicals: Rock and Roll Man and The Light in the Piazza

The cast of Rock and Roll Man: The Alan Freed Story. (Photo: Emma K. Rothenberg-Ware)

Rock and Roll Man: The Alan Freed Story is a new jukebox musical, currently in a Berkshire Theatre Group production at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, about the DJ who coined the term “rock and roll” and helped to promote what had been called “race music” and kept off white radio stations. Freed was a tireless supporter of African American artists like Little Richard and Chuck Berry; when their songs were covered by white-bread singers like Pat Boone, he refused to play the white versions, and he featured them prominently in the concerts he produced. But his career was shattered in the late fifties by payola and copyright scandals, and he died from the effects of alcoholism at the age of forty-three, in 1965. (You can see him in cameos in the mid-fifties movies Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock, as well as a few others; Tim McIntire played a character inspired by him, memorably, in the nifty 1978 Floyd Mutrux picture American Hot Wax.)