Theatre Calgary’s new staging of Come From Away aims for the heart, Theater News

On day one of rehearsals for Come From Away, director-choreographer Jesse Robb posed a question: “Where were you on September 11, 2001?”

Many of the responses from the cast and creative team — consisting primarily of Albertans — took him by surprise. “[Their] school didn’t even show footage. They didn’t know the day of. They didn’t go home. They just continue[d] with their day of classes,” he said. 

A graduate of New York University, Robb had a starkly different experience of the world-altering event: “I was in New York, living below 14th Street,” he shared. “And I was stuck [in the downtown core] when they basically barricaded it. Because of the lack of digital information at that time, those of us that were in Manhattan didn’t actually know what was going on until… [after] those that were seeing it on television.” 

Twenty-five years later, the Tony Award-nominated Canadian helms Theatre Calgary’s upcoming production of the beloved (and very widely produced) musical that celebrates the Canadian hospitality at the periphery of the American tragedy. He’s joined by associate director-choreographer and longtime creative collaborator Paige Parkhill, who, in addition to extensive work with the Walt Disney Company, has supported Robb in choreographing numerous shows, including Water for Elephants on Broadway and Spamalot at the Stratford Festival.

Written and composed by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, Come From Away is a true story that transports us to Gander, Newfoundland after 38 planes have been diverted to the local airport following the 9/11 attacks. There, a patchwork company of residents must suddenly accommodate the presence of almost 7,000 stranded passengers — a number that nearly doubles their small-town population overnight. 

B.C.-born Parkhill didn’t quite know what to expect when she and Robb went into the musical’s 2016 pre-Broadway tryout in Toronto. But sitting between him and “his Newfoundland born-and-raised mother,” she found herself “overwhelmed with Canadian pride.” 

“I was so pleasantly surprised,” she confessed. “I felt an urgency with the piece in terms of the music and the physicality. The music really shook me in a way that I didn’t expect.” 

For Robb, the musical felt especially immediate. “There was this sensibility, truth, and honesty about how the interactions of humanity exist on the Rock that feels very unique to the people of Newfoundland,” he said. “I looked at my mom after I saw it, and I thought, ‘This explains so much about my youth and so much about the values that my mother put on my sister and I in terms of how we interact with humanity and how we react in times of struggle, in times of hardship.’”

Despite their stirring first encounter with the musical, the pair recognize that our world isn’t the same one Come From Away was born into. Robb identified the specific challenge of telling stories in a media landscape dominated by streaming services, noting: “Our eye is quicker. Our heart is quicker. We’re dismissed much quicker.

“How do you get out of the synapses of the forward-thinking brain and into the body and the heart?” he asked. “It’s a whole new mathematical Rubik’s Cube to try and touch people in a way now, with the information we have post-pandemic.” 

Parkhill agreed, adding that “the world as a whole has an attention deficit issue. So, in order to hold the audience’s attention, the story needs to be told in new ways.” 

This is perhaps especially true of Come From Away, which has seen three Calgary productions since 2019 and was the U.S.’s most-produced show of the 2025-26 season — including a production at the Muny in St. Louis, choreographed by Robb and Parkhill, just last year. 

What makes the duo’s directorial approach unique, however, is a body- and person-first philosophy. “[My practice] comes from a very active, physical place,” Robb explained. “It really boils down to: ‘What are the words we’re saying and how are we carrying ourselves in space?’ Which I find lends itself really well to an orchestration like Come From Away.”

There are, of course, challenges that come with handling what Parkill fondly described as a “90-minute song” — that is, a one-act show boasting near-constant scoring with little room for digression. “The storytelling has to be crafted to an inch of its life so that you’re not unspooling the simplicity of the heart,” said Robb. “The backbone of why this piece works is the heart.”

It’s a heart including both the story itself and the artists who inhabit it: “Jesse is really good at taking the person and moulding them to shine and excel in whatever the piece offers,” Parkhill said. She commended Robb’s ability to “craft for the human, rather than coming in with a bunch of material that everybody has to do the same.” 

“I am not looking for the world of Rockettes,” he laughed. “I fight for the ‘other,’ which is the idea of portraying and lifting the existence as opposed to changing and creating one unified look.” 

Audiences may be wondering about the political undercurrents of a musical that focuses on Canada-U.S. relations. It’s precisely due to the precarity of our current moment, though, that Robb feels “the piece, in lots of ways, is even more resonant to me now than it was at the 20-year anniversary [of 9/11].” 

And he thinks Canadians today would still rise to the occasion: “I don’t even think — I know we’d do the same thing. I know that even in a political divide, in the animosity, in the anger — if the same event happened tomorrow, we’d do the same thing.”

Come From Away runs until June 27 at Theatre Calgary. More information is available here.

Theatre Calgary is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Eve Beauchamp

Eve Beauchamp (they/them) is an award-winning Calgary-based theatre artist, playwright, and graduate of the BFA in Acting at the University of Ottawa. They are the co-artistic director of Levity Theatre Company and primarily create work that explores queerness, capitalism, and neurodivergence through humour, poetry, and storytelling. Currently, you can find them pursuing their Master of Fine Arts in Drama at the University of Calgary.

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