Grounded… and enjoying it
Nothing but blue skies “Come from Away” at the Ahmanson by Bondo Wyszpolski If you’d walked into this show by accident I think you could be forgiven for thinking the actors are in a sports bar and watching the NBA finals. Not only that, but at various points in “Come from Away” the singers and dancers seem to be on the verge of slipping into some numbers from “Riverdance.” Actually, it’s an impressive feat to pull off an uplifting musical whose tragic origin was the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. But the Canadian husband-and-wife team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics for “Come from Away,” have done just that. On that fateful Tuesday morning the U.S. government ordered all planes out of the sky, to land at the closest acceptable airport (no jumbo jets at Zamperini in Torrance, for example), and for several international flights that meant rerouting to Gander in Newfoundland. Why Gander? Because, when your grandparents were young, airliners were less fuel efficient and often had to stop somewhere and gas up. The airport in Gander was built to accommodate those kinds of airborne leviathans. Whereas it might see half a dozen aircraft on a…
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