The Utah premiere of Tony-award winning hit, Come From Away arrives with a bold promise: “guaranteed to restore your faith in humanity”—the kind of tagline that usually invites skepticism. And yet, at Pioneer Theatre Company, the show makes good on it. Audiences have until May 9 to catch a production that doesn’t just recount a story, but gently rearranges your sense of what people are capable of.
What lingers first is the magic of the ensemble. Twelve actors, no stars among them, conjure an entire world—shifting, sometimes mid-stride, from stranded airline passengers to the residents of a small Newfoundland town. A jacket becomes a new identity, a posture signals a different life: it should feel like a gimmick. It doesn’t. Instead, it becomes a quiet marvel: storytelling so clean, so confident, that the mechanics disappear.
The events are rooted in the uneasy days following the September 11 attacks, when a wave of transatlantic flights was diverted to Gander, Newfoundland. The world had, quite suddenly, come unmoored. And into that rupture walked thousands of passengers—tired, disoriented, hungry—who were met not with suspicion or indifference, but with an almost disarming generosity. The people of Gander opened their homes, their schools, their kitchens. They offered not just shelter, but kindness.
The passengers are not tragic figures; they are inconvenienced, shaken…human. The townspeople are not saints, they are practical and warm, with an ‘anyone-would-do-the-same’ mentality. And yet, something quietly extraordinary unfolds in the space between them. There is no transaction here, no calculus of deservingness. Help is offered simply because it can be.
Even within an ensemble that insists on its own equality, certain performances surface. Galyana Castillo’s Hannah carries a tender gravity, particularly in ‘I Am Here,’ a moment that feels less performed than lived. Mary Fanning Driggs brings a lived-in familiarity to Beulah—the sort of person who feeds first and asks questions later. And John Schiappa’s Claud is rendered with such ease it’s hard to imagine the role existing without him.
But the real achievement of Come From Away is its refusal to overstate its thesis. It doesn’t argue that people are always good, or that tragedy reliably produces grace. Instead, it offers a smaller, more persuasive claim: that, sometimes, in the absence of obligation or spectacle, people show up for one another anyway. Not because they must. Not because anyone is watching. Just because they can.
- What: Pioneer Theatre Company’s Come From Away
- When: April 24-May 9, 2026
- Where: Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre, 300 South 1400 East, Salt Lake City
- Prices: $57 – $83; Students K – 12 or ages 5-18 are half-price Monday – Thursday
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