“Come From Away,” the inspirational musical about how a remote city in Canada welcomed frightened travelers when flights over the North Atlantic were grounded amid the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be the most staged show in the United States this season, according to a count by American Theater magazine.
The musical, which opened on Broadway in 2017, was an unlikely hit — many people in the theater business thought ticket buyers in New York would not be open to a Sept. 11-focused musical, but they were wrong, and the show ran until 2022 (with a big break for the pandemic) and spun off replica productions around the world.
Now the show, written by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, is available for licensing, and at least 23 regional theaters are planning to stage it this season, the magazine said. (The show is now running at Nashville Repertory Theater in Tennessee and at Paramount Theater in Aurora, Ill., and among the others scheduled to produce it this year are Northern Stage in Vermont, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Asolo Repertory Theater in Sarasota, Fla., and Seattle Rep.)
The show has also been staged each of the last three summers in Gander, Newfoundland, where it is set, and next month it is to be staged on a Cunard cruise to the Caribbean.
“It’s really thrilling, and I think it is a testament to a beautiful story well told,” said Sue Frost, one of the lead producers of the Broadway production. “People are still looking for stories that give them hope.”
American Theater magazine counts theater productions each year; this year it looked at the seasons of 293 companies that are members of its parent organization, Theater Communications Group, as well as productions at nonmember and commercial theaters. Its counts do not include works by Shakespeare, or versions of “A Christmas Carol,” because those are so common they would swamp the lists each year.
This season’s most produced shows, after “Come From Away,” include “Primary Trust,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Eboni Booth, and “Eureka Day,” a Tony-winning play by Jonathan Spector. The Top 10 list has a higher number of musicals than usual — it also includes “Frozen,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” which Rob Weinert-Kendt, the editor in chief of American Theater magazine, noted could be good news for theater workers, because musicals generally employ more people than do plays.
The most produced playwrights (a separate list), is led by Lauren Gunderson, whose work is widely produced at regional theaters. The play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which led the count two years in a row, didn’t make the list of most-produced shows this season.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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