Come from Away, Junkyard Dog and Rodney Rigby, Canberra Theatre, 17 June-9 July

 

I've reviewed this production before, several years back on its long, covid-disrupted tour around Australia (link to my previous review here. And I've had these tickets booked for me and my husband for around two and a half years. It's a pleasure to say that the show is every bit as charming, warm, personal, and all round enjoyable in June 2023 as it was in December 2019. And it should deservedly have packed houses delighted for the next three weeks.

The question is why does this show, largely about events 22 years ago, originally staged in 2013 and developing in multiple productions across Canada and the US to premiere on Broadway in 2017 and in Australia and London in 2019, work? It's a very unconventional musical - based on interviews with those participating in the events it documents, with a score made up largely of Canadian Folk music sung by an ensemble of 12 with no real "star parts" (the closest it comes to a conventional music-theatre moment is the pilot's song "Me and the Sky"), presented with minimal bells and whistles (the cast swap characters with a switch of a shirt or a hat, on a set made up of chairs and tables, using a revolve and a simple yet effective lighting rig sparingly).  And the effect of all that simplicity is to make it an incredibly human-scale show, telling a tale of a community that makes us feel like part of it. It's not pollyanna-ish about it, and, being Canadian, it's never Gung Ho American about the topic. Being based on verbatim theatre techniques enhances how very real it feels, down to the loose ends of the story, with some characters left hurt in ways that don't have easy repairs. It's about the joys of community, but also the small ways that communities can set up boundaries around themselves which hurt all the more when you see how easy acceptance is for everyone else. And it's about small joys and losses in a bigger context, about the personal perspective on a giant event, and about the power of that scale. 

I'm incredibly joyous I got a chance to share this show with my husband, and I hope the rest of my community gets to share in it too over the next three weeks.