Theatre
Feature
Come From Away wins Best New Musical at Olivier Awards
Come From Away adds Olivier Award Winner to their growing list of accolades after winning four awards at this year's ceremony.
The Olivier Awards were recently hosted in London, celebrating the best in British theatre.
While we’re not in Britain, we love celebrating great theatre, and even more so when the best new musical winner, Come From Away, is making its Australian premiere in July.
Come From Away was nominated for a total of nine Olivier Awards this year, winning four including; Best New Musical, Outstanding Achievement in Music, Best Sound Design, and Best Theatre Choreographer.
These most recent wins add to the growing list of accolades this new musical has won, including Tony Awards, Drama Desk Awards, Outer Critics Circle Awards, and even scoring a Grammy nomination.
We cannot wait to play host to such a celebrated show.
It’s not hard to understand why Come From Away is receiving such acclaim, with a powerful narrative entirely based on true events surrounding the experiences of passengers on stranded planes in Gander, Newfoundland after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Almost 7000 passengers from 92 different countries were stranded in this small Canadian town in the five days following the attacks, almost doubling the population.
The people of Gander went above and beyond for these ‘plane people’, housing them in their homes, schools, clubhouses, and community centres. Everyone in town, and in the surrounding towns, brought plates of food, ending up with so much that they had to use the town’s indoor ice-hockey rink as a giant refrigerator.
But the people of Gander didn’t just offer the stranded passengers food and shelter, they offered them comfort and distraction, and a spirit that stayed with them long after they returned home.
This incredible story is paired with a primarily Irish folk-inspired score complete with instrumentation that includes accordion, harmonium, an Irish flute, whistles, and Uilleann pipes, fiddles, and guitars.
The combination of sound and story creates a production that is brilliantly powerful and uniquely uplifting.
We can’t help but be excited about what the Australian cast will bring to the production and we’ll be counting down the days until it opens at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre in July.
Book your tickets at Ticketmaster.com.au for performances through to the end of September.
