Irene Sankoff, co-creator and cast member of Come From Away, in the dressing room after a rehearsal at the Elgin Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto on July 15.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Come From Away co-creator Irene Sankoff visited Gander, N.L., many times with her collaborator (and husband) David Hein while developing their musical set there. And she’s been to the small town famous for its warm greeting of the “plane people” diverted there after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many times since that musical became a Canadian record breaker, a Broadway smash and an international hit.
But this summer will mark the first time Sankoff steps into her and Hein’s own theatrical version of Gander as an actor – putting on a Newfoundland accent and playing a character living through that history-changing day when 38 airplanes carrying 6,579 passengers paid an unexpected visit, nearly doubling the local population.
“My daughter uses the word ‘nerv-cited’,” says Sankoff – it’s a portmanteau of nervous and excited – after a recent performance of the show’s opening number Welcome to the Rock in front of invited media in Toronto. “I guess I am nerv-cited, full on.”
The original, twice pandemic-shuttered Canadian production of Come From Away is being revived in Ottawa in August at the National Arts Centre, ahead of a Toronto run that begins in September at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.
For the show’s dates in the nation’s capital, Sankoff will play Bonnie, the head of the Gander area SPCA who discovers that there are animals stuck in the planes stranded in Newfoundland – and does her utmost to keep them alive.
The part, originated by Newfoundland stage legend Petrina Bromley (who is currently acting in a separate Canadian production running in Gander itself) and which will be played again by Kristen Peace in Toronto, is in many ways the heart of the show.
Irene Sankoff and cast member Kristen Peace.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
There was a time when musical-theatre writers might have only performed their own material while pitching it to producers – but doing so in front of audiences has been increasingly common in the 21st century.
The trend’s start might be traced to 2006 when Canadian comedian Bob Martin starred as Man in Chair on Broadway in The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he and Don McKellar won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. It was a good career move – boosting his profile, and immersing him in the New York scene for a year, helping make him the in-demand book writer he has been ever since.
Two years after Drowsy, a little-known composer-lyricist named Lin-Manuel Miranda played the lead, Usnavi, in his own musical, In the Heights, on Broadway in 2008. Miranda would then become a household name when he starred in his next show – the hip-hop history blockbuster Hamilton in 2015.
Others who have performed in their own shows on Broadway in the past decade include filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell (in Hedwig and the Angry Inch), singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles (in Waitress) and composer-lyricist Shaina Taub, a newly minted Tony Award winner whose historical musical Suffs is still running.
This summer will mark the first time Sankoff steps into her and Hein’s own theatrical version of Gander, N.L., as an actor.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
For Sankoff – who began her career in theatre as an actor, studying at the Actors Studio – the idea of performing in a Come From Away production came to her when theatre started to come back after the pandemic shutdown, and understudies and swing performers were becoming even more crucial to the success of commercial theatre productions.
It was the Writers Guild of America strike last year, however, that actually got her learning the female parts she and Hein had created based on real Ganderites. “It was pencils down and I just needed something creative to be doing,” Sankoff recalls.
Last summer, Sankoff got her stage legs back by acting into a solo show called Dog Gone, written and directed by Brenda McFarlane, at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival.
Christopher Ashley, the American director of the original production Come From Away who is back at the helm of the revived Canadian production, first talked to Sankoff about playing the role of Janice, the novice Newfoundlander TV reporter who finds herself with a story of a lifetime, in the show. But eventually they both decided Bonnie just fit best.
The Tony-winning director has worked with Sankoff since the show was in development but this is the first time he’s directed her as an actor. “There are sides of her, nooks and crannies of how she is as a performer, that I never saw when she was a writer,” says Ashley.
David Hein and Irene Sankoff after a rehearsal at the Elgin Winter Garden Theatre on July 15. The couple, who have a ten-year-old daughter, have also started to work on projects separately.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
“People are gonna really enjoy seeing her on stage and seeing the way that she embodies this story and the fierceness of Bonnie, which is really in Irene.”
After Ottawa, Sankoff will be back to writing again. She and Hein are about “45 to 50 pages” into a new musical about neurodiversity that she hopes will have a reading this fall; she can’t say much else about it now, except that, as with both Come From Away and her and Hein’s 2009 mini-hit musical My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding, it draws on real-life stories.
The couple, who have a ten-year-old daughter, have also started to work on projects separately – again, nothing they can talk about to the press at the moment.
Whatever Sankoff writes next, however, it will include more strong lead roles for middle-aged women – as was the case for both Wiccan Wedding and Come From Away.
Creating characters for veteran female musical theatre performers of all shapes and sizes is something Sankoff has been vocally passionate about since the first interviews she gave 15 years ago – and, though it wasn’t in her self-interest then, she can now step into some of the roles she wrote. Of the pair of female leads who were “nearly 40″ at the centre of Wiccan Wedding, she says with a laugh: “That doesn’t seem so old now!”
Come From Away runs at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa from Aug. 14 to Sept. 1; it then begins a run at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, with Mirvish Productions, starting Sept. 22.