Volume 23 Issue 5 - February 2018

feature film is being made, written by the show’s creators.
As I write this column the new Canadian company of Come From
Away is in Winnipeg performing a sold-out run at the Manitoba
Theatre Centre until February 3 before returning to Toronto to prepare
for the run here.
Leading up to the second
first-night at the Royal Alex on
February 13, I wanted to touch
base with Irene Sankoff and
David Hein to ask a few questions
about this new stage of
their incredible journey.
WN: How does it feel to be
coming home after the huge
success you have had with the
show on Broadway, particularly
when the show had
it’s first beginnings here at
Sheridan College and then the
sold-out run at the Royal Alex
last year?
IS: It’s practically unbelievable.
When we started at Sheridan – and even at the Royal Alex –
there’s no way we could have had any idea how far this would go. We
originally hoped it might play in Canadian high schools because it had
historical content and many characters, and now to have it playing
in two countries every night, it’s beyond our wildest dreams – but it
is such a testament to the power of the story that we’re telling. That’s
what we fell in love with in the first place and it’s thrilling to see so
many others feel the same way.
DH: As a kid who grew up on Canadian folk music, there’s something
really exciting about seeing this story and these traditional
instruments brought back and celebrated by a Canadian cast – especially
in the town where we were first started. It means the world
to share it with the community that supported us while we were
obsessed with telling this story and following every opportunity that
came our way.
WN: I understand you have an all-Canadian cast for this remount,
which is exciting. Did you find that you looked for different qualities
– or did you discover different casting possibilities in the process this
time around?
DH: Many of these performers we’ve either worked with before
or have admired their work – some were new to us. It’s such a joy
watching them create and invent it again. Chris Ashley, our director,
really let the cast work through it organically.
IS: When we first cast the show, we all agreed that we weren’t
looking for dopplegangers of the real people – and when we cast it
in Canada again, we weren’t looking for copies of the Broadway cast.
What’s so exciting, within this intricately detailed and blocked-out
show, is how much interpretation each actor can bring. That, and
apparently their Newfoundland accents are a little better.
WN: Is there anything else new or different in the show compared
to the original production that we can expect? I understand that
there is at least one new song.
IS: There is! As we were leaving the Royal Alex, we recorded the
cast album in the last week. (I think it’s the only Grammy-nominated
Original Broadway Cast Album recorded in Canada.) Chris had been
asking us for another song for one of the characters since La Jolla
Playhouse two years earlier, but we didn’t feel like we had a real way
in to that character until a couple weeks prior to recording when
we spent an afternoon with her and her family. Suddenly this new
song appeared, about a mother being far away from her son. It was
recorded for the album before it was ever put in front of an audience,
which was risky.
DH: And yet now – we can’t imagine the show without it! It feels
like we’ve made a million tiny changes, right up to opening night –
but in so many ways it’s the same true stories which made us laugh
and cry and cheer out, in Newfoundland – and it’s so wonderful to
return to celebrate everything that’s happened on this crazy journey.
Performances of Come From Away begin at the Royal Alexandra
Theatre on February 13.
QUICK PICKS
Feb 1 to 11: Richard Rose’s
exhilarating rock-‘n’-rollscored
Hamlet continues at
Tarragon Theatre.
Feb 1 to 4: St Anne’s Music and
Dramatic Society presents the
wonderful and too rarely seen
Gilbert & Sulivan Ruddigore.
Feb 4 to 25: Coal Mine Theatre
presents Rumours, by Fleetwood
Mac, not a musical but a recreation
in concert of the wellknown
and beloved Fleetwood
Mac album by a chosen group of
Toronto musicians.
Irene Sankoff and David Hein Feb 9 to 22: Soulpepper
continues its hybrid concert/
storytelling series with a spotlight on the Roaring 20s with
Prohibition, the Concert, created by Richard Ouzounian, Gregory
Prest and Mike Ross.
Feb 15: Opera Atelier recreates the concert they performed in the
Royal Chapel of the Palace of Versailles last May. Transforming the
concert into a moving dance/music theatre hybrid event is the inclusion
and integration of the lyrical and moving new contemporary
dance piece choreographed and danced by Tyler Gledhill to an evocative
solo violin score composed and played by Edwin Huizinga. One
Night Only.
Feb 22-24: Canadian Stage continues its showcase of original and
groundbreaking music makers with Musica Nuda featuring vocalist
Petra Magoni and double-bassist Ferruccio Spinetti. Not a musical but
apparently dramatic and deconstructing performance.
Feb 26: “How to Succeed in Musical Theatre Business Without Really
Trying,” hosted by the The Musical Stage Company. This one-day event
will be held at the Al Green Theatre in Toronto and is free of charge for
Canadian musical theatre writers.
Toronto-based “lifelong theatre person” Jennifer (Jenny) Parr
works as a director, fight director, stage manager and coach, and is
equally crazy about movies and musicals.
SANKOFF AND HEIN
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