Twelve actors play 41 parts in Come From Away, which opens in Lisbon on 10 September
The musical runs at the Capitolio until 4 October, directed by Pedro Pernas and produced by the Lisbon Film Orchestra. It tells the week 38 planes landed in a small Newfoundland town with American airspace closed. Tickets are 25 to 35 euros.
The arithmetic is the first thing that gets you. Twelve performers on stage, 41 characters in the script. Almost everybody who walks on will be somebody else ten minutes later, and that is what makes Come From Away an odd object inside the musical genre: it has no lead. It has a town.
The town is Gander, in Newfoundland. In the week after 11 September 2001, with United States airspace shut, 38 aircraft were diverted to its airport carrying roughly seven thousand passengers — a number close to the local population. Residents put them up, fed them and looked after them until they could fly on. Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s musical is that week, told from the inside, without heroes and with a surprising amount of humour, which is probably the only decent way to tell it.
Dates, times and tickets
The Lisbon Film Orchestra produces, and the Portuguese premiere is on 10 September at the Capitolio in Parque Mayer, running until 4 October. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 9pm, Saturday at 4pm and 9pm, and Sunday at 4pm. It runs 105 minutes with no interval, and tickets are 25 to 35 euros. Two performances carry audio description, on 2 and 4 October.
Pedro Pernas directs, with Nuno de Sa as musical director, Laura Povoa on choreography and movement, and Ana Paula Rocha on set and costume. The cast is Andre Lourenco, Catarina Leao, Helena Montez, Joao Marques, Madalena Pepolino, Mari Ribeiro, Marta Lys, Paulo Duarte Ribeiro, Paulo Oom, Pedro Paz, Ricardo Monteiro and Teresa Macedo.
One calendar note nobody printed on the poster: opening night falls the day before the anniversary itself. Whether that is deliberate programming the theatre does not say. It will change the temperature in the room.
If you are building a September that is not made entirely of festivals, this is a good anchor — the same instinct that took ten free performances into cloisters and markets in Amarante this month. For Lisbon, the full listing with times and sessions is on the Capitolio’s site.
Image: Teatro Variedades e Capitolio / EGEAC (official production image)
