Musical coming to Tucson celebrates strangers helping strangers

Thirty-eight planes with a total of almost 7,000 passengers on board were diverted from American airspace to Gander, population under 10,000, after two planes crashed into New York’s World Trade Center.

The story of how the Ganderites — that’s what they call residents of the town — rallied to feed and shelter the “plane people” was made into the musical “Come From Away,” which Broadway in Tucson is bringing to Centennial Hall next week. The show runs Tuesday, May 24, through May 29.

“I think it feels a lot more like a play that just happens to have music than an original five, six, seven, eight kind of dance number musical,” said Marika Aubrey, who plays Beverley Bass, the first female captain of an American Airlines commercial plane who was piloting one of those planes that day.

Canadian playwrights Irene Sankoff and David Hein based “Come From Away” on interviews they did with the plane people and residents who set aside their political, religious and cultural differences to help one another. The play uses real names, from Mayor Claude Elliott to Bonnie Harris, who managed the animal shelter. Cast members play several characters.

“You’ve got these 12 actors on stage and a bunch of chairs and we keep flipping in and out in different outfits as different passengers and different people who were part of this story,” said Aubrey, who plays four characters including Bass.

“That’s another unique thing about this show: You don’t often play someone who is alive and well and coming in and talking to you and having dinner with you. So that is weird and excellent,” said the Australian actress, who has spent time with the real Beverly Bass.

“She’s a friend. It’s just an unusual and lovely thing to come out of this project,” Aubrey said. “There is no other world in which I would be friends with a female pilot who lives in Texas. We are very different; we come from different parts of the planet. There is no way our paths would have crossed in any context, so it’s a really unusual, fun byproduct of this project.”

The road show of “Come From Away” — the title is based on what Newfoundlanders call the tourists to their far-flung island, which can take days to reach by air because there are very few direct flights from anywhere in the world — kicked off in 2018 but was sidelined in 2020 due to the pandemic. The show restarted last October with most of the original road cast.

The show’s message of unity in times of crisis — “Even though we can all be different, have different politics, have different ways of looking at the world, we are essentially all the same when it comes down to it.” — resonates more now than it did in 2018, Aubrey said.

“The state of the world right now and what we have been through and what is happening in Ukraine, there’s just this feeling that this story of communities coming together to help each other in times of crisis is resonating far more deeply,” said Aubrey, who spent time in the Phoenix area as a high school exchange student. “I felt the show did that before COVID, but you come into the theater now … there is definitely this sense of hey, hi, we’re back together. It is incredibly profound at times sharing this with an audience again.”

Aubrey said that audiences often come with a box of tissues expecting an emotionally draining experience given the sensitivity of the story — the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. But what they find is that “it’s much more a story of the joy and the generosity that can be found in even the most (expletive) circumstances.”

“By and large it is actually about the quirks and funny moments of humanity, when we come together in culture and religion and clash in a way that is funny and human and heartfelt,” she said. “It’s 140 minutes of a real story that will make you feel good.”