Grounded

COME FROM AWAY

Birmingham Hippodrome, Tuesday 21^st May 2024

The hit musical arrives in Birmingham with a trail of five-star reviews and dazzling acclaim, so I am keen to see what all the fuss is about.

The story is based on true events.  After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the USA closed its air space and so aeroplanes were diverted.  It turns out that Newfoundland, off the Canadian coast, has a massive airport (it used to be a refuelling stop) and so dozens of the aircraft are sent there.  The 7,000 passengers almost double the island’s population.  The locals do their utmost to accommodate the new arrivals.  Then, a few days later, clearance is given for the planes to fly away.  Lives have been changed in the interim.  Apparently.

My first surprise is how Oirish the people of Newfoundland sound!  Is this Canada or Craggy Island?  Father Ted could walk on at any second.  This means all the music, played by an excellent on-stage band, has more than a touch of the diddly-diddly-dee to it.  The music and lyrics are by Irene Sankoff and David Kein.  It’s their first musical, and it shows.  The songs are forgettable, even while they’re being sung, and given that most of them are performed chorally, it’s not long before I’m craving a solo number just to change the sound.  Solos are few and far between, and are nothing to phone home about.  And there’s a love duet about stopping the world that made me long for just that eventuality.

The hardworking cast try their damnedest to depict a selection of the 16,000 characters.  This means we only see them in snippets.  Rather than scenes we get vignettes and sketches that are more about the punchline than character development.  At one point, the characters are reduced to telling actual jokes.  We flit from storyline to storyline, and with little to differentiate between characters, it’s easy to confuse who an actor is being before the snippet is snipped. 

Some characters get more stage time than others.  We meet Bonnie (Rosie Glossop) the only one to think about the animals in the holds of the planes and care for them.  We meet Hannah (Bree Smith), a ‘come from away’ worried about her firefighter son who is missing since that fateful day.  We meet a number of mayors, all played by Nicholas Proud, who at least changes his hat to distinguish them.  We meet a gay couple, both called Kevin (Jamal Zulfiqar and Mark Dugdale) whose relationship comes under strain, even though they’ve wound up on the most gay friendly island ever, it seems.  And we meet Ali (Jamal Zulfiqar again) who is singled out because he’s Middle Eastern and therefore not to be trusted.  The blatant racism rears its ugly head but goes undeveloped and unresolved.  And I don’t really buy that there’s not a single dissenting voice among the islanders at the influx of so many people.  Perhaps in reality there was no opposition, but I feel we need one, for the sake of Drama.

The show is meant to remind us that there is good in humanity, especially at times of adversity.  One glance at the news suggests otherwise.  Perhaps the island is the last bastion of the milk of human kindness.  Or perhaps like us, they have turned selfish and xenophobic, and have adopted a ‘stop the boats’ mentality, while turning a blind eye to genocide or even facilitating it.

However well done it is – and it is staged in a lively manner, and performed well by a talented cast – it’s going to take more than this shallow and forgettable score to warm the cockles of this world-weary cynic.

☆ ☆ ☆

Plane to see. The cast of COME FROM AWAY (Photo: Craig Sugden)