This musical by the Canadian married team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein has grown from a regional success into a global phenomenon. You can see why: it records the hospitality shown by the people of Newfoundland to the 7,000 bewildered passengers on the 38 planes that were diverted there on 9/11. It is musically vigorous and excellently staged but, although I may be in a minority of one, I found something bludgeoning about its relentless celebration of civic virtue.
That is not to denigrate the exemplary behaviour of the citizens of Gander, nor the endurance of the puzzled passengers. The musical shows not only how people were fed, housed and entertained but also how lives were permanently changed. Two women, both of whose sons are firefighters, bond for life, and a diffident British oil exec discovers his future wife in an American divorcee. But, while I get the point that unexpected good can come out of a disaster, I also hungered for rather more conflict. We see how an Egyptian Muslim is viewed with suspicion until it’s discovered he’s a great chef, and a gay couple’s relationship splinters after five days in Gander. For the most part, however, the show offers an affirmative, and unvarying tribute to Canadian kindness.
The songs, which have a folk-rock feel, are good and Christopher Ashley’s direction and Kelly Devine’s musical staging ingeniously use rearranged chairs to evoke both a suffocating plane cabin and the diverse spaces opened to the visitors: there is one heartstopping moment when the passengers, hitherto kept in the dark about events in New York, gaze in silent horror at TV images of the Twin Towers. In a 12-strong ensemble, there are also striking performances from Rachel Tucker as a trailblazing female pilot, Robert Hands and Helen Hobson as loners who find love in unlikely circumstances and Jenna Boyd and Cat Simmons as two women united by maternal anxiety. The show could hardly be better done even if, as a work of art, I found it lacking in complexity and argument.
• Phoenix theatre, London, until 14 September.
