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[0:03] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation.

[0:06] David Armstrong: Welcome to the Rock Time Islander Right.

[0:11] David Armstrong: The podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process.

[0:23] David Armstrong: I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode on the shoulders of giants.

[0:28] David Armstrong: You are here at the style of the moment of the edge of the world.

[0:40] David Armstrong: Today, my guests are Irene Sankoff and David Hein, the dynamic writing team and married couple that created the giant international smash hit musical Come From Away.

[0:52] David Armstrong: Five productions of Come From Away have recently reopened on Broadway in Toronto, London, Sydney, and on tour across America.

[1:00] David Armstrong: And a live filmed version of the show is currently streaming on Apple TV Plus.

[1:05] David Armstrong: Irene and David have been honored with 2019 Olivier Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Music and Best New Musical, as well as 2017 Tony Award nominations for Best Musical, Best Book and Best Score, and a 2018 Grammy nomination for Best Musical Theater Album.

[1:23] David Armstrong: In this conversation, we explore how Come From Away fits into the history of the Broadway musical.

[1:28] David Armstrong: Who were the musical theater writers from the past that influenced Irene and David, and what classic musicals inspired them?

[1:35] David Armstrong: We'll also look back at their first musical, which was titled My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding.

[1:41] David Armstrong: But first, I wanted to find out how they got started on the road to Broadway in the first place.

[1:47] David Armstrong: Welcome.

[1:47] David Armstrong: Welcome to you both.

[1:48] Irene Sankoff: Thank you.

[1:49] David Hein: Thank you.

[1:49] Irene Sankoff: Thank you so much for being here.

[1:51] Irene Sankoff: So I started just loving dance and seeing Broadway review shows and just being obsessed with them and memorizing choreography and learning music videos in my living room. I was a dance major in high school. I have a hypermobility syndrome, so that meant that I was not going to be a dancer, even though it sounds like being hypermobile would be a good thing. But I was also just injured all the time. And then I went into theater in university, which is where I met David. Then I switched out of theater, not because I met David, but unrelated circumstances and went into psychology, then picked up creative writing, then did a master's in acting, and then kind of did a combination of acting and teaching kids with learning challenges.

[2:32] David Hein: David and I never saw each other because we were doing day jobs and also trying to perform. He was a singer songwriter, I was an actor. We never saw each other. So we were like, well, I know what we'll do is we can hang out. Let's write a show together and perform in it. If Irene grew up on musical theater, she watched every musical. Her mom took her to the cheap seats at lots of musicals and like the high school versions of things, because that's what was around where we lived. I grew up on folk music, and my mom took me to the Winnipeg Folk Festival to see tons of people perform. I think the first musical I saw was only in university, and it was Phantom or Cats at that point. But when I met Irene, she introduced me to Rent. She introduced me to a million different musicals, and quickly I kind of fell in love with that. And I introduced her to a lot of guys playing acoustic guitar music.

[3:17] Irene Sankoff: Yes.

[3:18] David Hein: And so Come From Away to some degree as a marriage of those two musical styles.

[3:22] Irene Sankoff: A literal marriage.

[3:23] David Hein: Yeah, literal marriage.

[3:25] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. There was a summer where we just weren't feeling like we saw each other enough, and we thought, why don't we write a musical? I think looking back on that, we had no idea how hard it was. And at the same time, we put on a show called My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding, which is a true story. We like true stories about my mom and how she came out to me and discovered her sexuality and rediscovered her Jewish faith. We put it on in the fringe and suddenly it sold out. This was in the Toronto fringe. We were in a little 80-seat house at the back of this little bar. Which is now a condo, because that's the way it goes anyway. And then the Mervishes, the largest Canadian theater producer, came to see it all of a sudden and picked it up.

We had a couple months to write an extra half hour for it, and we put it on in a 700-seat theater in Toronto, and it ran for months and months. We started not having any time to see each other, and suddenly we're hip to hip and working together all the time. So it worked really well.

[4:19] David Hein: Amazing.

[4:20] David Armstrong: And when did love enter the picture?

[4:22] Irene Sankoff: Oh, right.

[4:23] David Hein: Oh, well, we were married already at that point.

[4:24] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no.

[4:25] David Hein: Yeah, no, we met in university. We started dating.

[4:28] Irene Sankoff: Wow.

[4:28] David Hein: Okay, hang on.

[4:30] David Hein: 95?

[4:31] Irene Sankoff: 95?

[4:32] David Hein: Yeah, it was a couple years after. We were friends first for a long time. And then eventually we started dating each other, and it was even better. And so we were together for a long time in Toronto. Irene came down to get her master's in acting, and I followed her because I was in love with her. I got to work in a Muppet recording studio here that Irene's uncle owned. So we got a lot of wonderful opportunities within that. And also got to see a million shows and drove back and forth between Toronto and New York, just listening to every musical we could and singing them to each other. I still miss those drives. You know, it's harder with a kid.

[5:03] Irene Sankoff: Well, and with a successful career where people want you to be somewhere when we didn't have jobs or a kid or friends, we could just drive and talk about musical theater.

[5:11] David Hein: It was so much easier when we didn't have to work, wasn't it?

[5:13] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, exactly.

[5:14] David Hein: Yes.

[5:16] David Armstrong: What were some of those shows that you obsessed over as a kid?

[5:20] Irene Sankoff: Sure. Okay. The first musical I ever saw was Guys and Dolls, and I was obsessed. And then I saw Damn Yankees and going downtown in Toronto during the magnificent 80s to see all of the mega musicals that were there at the time. So like Crazy for You and Phantom of the Opera and Ragtime, Showboat, Cats, Les, of course, like a lot. I saw Le Miz a lot. Because it was like 15 bucks in the back row. And at the time, like it cost the same pretty much to see a movie in Toronto. So I was like, well, I'd rather see this again. And then I guess as I got older, I remember I was obsessed with Once on This Island for like 10 years before I got a chance to see it. Into the Woods was amazing. This is embarrassing, but I lived in the suburbs, so I was obsessed with the movie version of A Chorus Line.

I also had the cassette of the Broadway, but generally speaking, we didn't get to see a lot of stuff unless it came through on a tour. When I saw A Chorus Line, I guess like five or so years ago, I just realized that oh my gosh, I know the whole thing off my heart. And I was like, oh wait, I think it did influence the writing of Come From Away, even though I wasn't aware of it until I was sitting there, like basically reciting all the lines along with the actors. I think that's the way writing works. So much of it is in your head somewhere, and you don't even understand where the influence came or what even you wrote till after it's done. Especially a sequence like Hello 12, Hello 13, Hello Love is in a way a sort of mini version of Come From Away. It's a whole cast of people and we're in all of their heads all at the same time.

[6:55] David Hein: One little fart!

[6:58] Irene Sankoff: And they called me stinky for three years!

[7:02] David Hein: Goodbye, 13, my god, a movie!

[7:08] Irene Sankoff: Tell me hello!

[7:14] David Hein: I'll show you mine!

[7:16] Irene Sankoff: You showed me yours!

[7:17] David Hein: Seeing Daddy naked!

[7:19] Irene Sankoff: Time to go!

[7:21] David Hein: Time to go!

[7:24] Irene Sankoff: Mom and Dad were doing it!

[7:26] David Hein: Yeah, I only heard that on the cassette, right? Like it's not in the movie where I sat watching over and over again. But I also think At the Ballet, right? Like they have their monologues like intertwined with the music there as well and the repeating refrains. And going in and out of song and in and out of dialogue in such a masterful way.

[7:44] David Hein: Exactly.

[7:44] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, I've only seen the stage production, I think three times. Like I think twice on a tour.

[7:52] David Hein: I think I've only seen it once.

[7:53] Irene Sankoff: Did you only see it at Stratford?

[7:54] David Hein: Yeah.

[7:55] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, okay. But I still made him listen to the cassette because we had a car that had a cassette player at one point.

[8:00] David Hein: Irene was my musical educator.

[8:01] Irene Sankoff: I feel like it's similar with a lot of shows that they go into your subconscious in that way. You stand on the shoulders of giants, whether you acknowledge it or not. Every show is based on you seeing a show and falling in love with the theatricality of it, and then building off that. I think part of what influenced Come From Away, at least, but also what influenced My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding was certainly fourth wall breaking. That show was built on a song. It was a silly song that I'd written. It just said the words My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding over and over again. Uh and that was the joke of it. Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding was nice. Not a typical wedding.

It was out in a field and nobody threw rest. I held the hook and it was pretty good. Should have seen my Uncle Larry and a look at my mother's lesbian Jewish wicked wedding was great. There was a mountains of food, and after the food there was cake. Me and my band played a couple of tunes, and my mom's jumped over a pot and a broom. True story. Mamma's lesbian, Jewish wicked wedding was fun. My singer-songwriter act would be that I would sit on stage and I'd tell stories, and then I'd sing a song that you know the story would be about the song, or the song would be about the story, or vice versa. And you'd just talk to the audience back and forth, and sometimes in the middle of it, I'd get audience ideas.

It was all interactive. And so when we started doing theater, it was a lot of I'm going to tell you a story. Hi, everyone, that came from that singer-songwriter aesthetic, and then adding in a scene next to you that could play, and then stepping into that scene and commenting on that scene and commenting on that song. I think the A Chorus Line dynamic played well with that to some degree. And then when we started writing Come From Away, we didn't even really agree that it was a musical for the first little while.

[9:49] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, because my background is like straight plays.

[9:52] David Hein: I don't even like that term because what does that mean?

[9:54] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, plays.

[9:55] David Hein: Thank you.

[9:55] David Hein: Plays non-musical plays.

[9:57] Irene Sankoff: Non-musical plays.

[9:58] David Hein: With plays that only have underscore sometimes.

[10:00] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. Almost everything we wrote, I'm like, really think this is a musical entry? But I'd grown up on folk music, and that included a ton of Newfoundland music. And so I knew not only was it amazing music and this incredible original sound that had never been heard on Broadway, not that we were aiming at Broadway at that point, but it I'd never heard on stage in a musical, but it was in the DNA of the people out there. You really needed it to tell the story, and the music was how they had gotten through their winters. The music was how they had done this. But our initial model for this was The Laramie Project. It was going out, let's do some interviews, and the interviews were so good and the verbatim was so amazing, especially for a show about people from around the world, everyone's speech patterns and stories and their perspective on the story and their unique history of it that we really wanted to capture.

So The Laramie Project and jumping quickly from one thing to another and trying to pack in as many stories as possible was where we started. And then once we realized the music was important, it became a way to facilitate us telling all of those stories. And I think all of those things combined in a pot to create Come From Away.

[11:04] David Hein: Well in some ways it's easier to jump time and space in a musical idiom than it is in a non-musical play form.

[11:12] Irene Sankoff: Yeah.

[11:12] David Hein: Oh completely especially when you are in Canada and don't have much of a budget and blackouts aren't gonna work but you can switch music. You know there's many sections in Come From Away where each actor or some of the actors each say one line, one line, one line they're just iterating the things that they were given on the plane or the things that they saw one after another and in a play without any music it would feel disjointed but you put it to music and suddenly it feels lyrical.

[11:40] Irene Sankoff: It's a chorus all jumping in together.

[11:42] David Hein: Exactly.

[11:42] David Armstrong: So connect us from My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding to Come From Away.

[11:48] David Hein: Sure. Well you're a big hit off Broadway in essence in Toronto.

[11:52] Irene Sankoff: Off off in Toronto. We had a lot of fun moving around North America with that show performing in it brought it to the Nymph Festival here in New York and it was an amazing experience in that we had Anne Harada and Liz Larson played my mom's it was really wonderful and at the same time it was challenging. We had to raise a lot of money we had traveled down here by ourselves and did everything like we always did ever since Wick and Wedding started, we had done the posters and the laundry and everything.

[12:21] David Hein: Produce, write, act, yeah, everything. We got a couple of licenses out. It was challenging because the Mervishes who originally picked it up in Toronto held the rights for it, but they were not a licensing company. It was challenging for us to get the word out. And the way that that show spread was people would come to see it in Rochester or at the Finger Lakes Music Theater Festival in Auburn. Uh, and then they would want to do the show based on that. We performed it over and over again. It was really fun. We got to get married on stage ourselves, and it was a wonderful experience.

[12:52] Irene Sankoff: We appeared in it as well.

[12:53] David Hein: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In the original incarnations as well.

[12:57] Irene Sankoff: Yes, from the beginning.

[12:58] David Hein: From the beginning. So this was a vehicle for the two of you in a way.

[13:02] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, and the play was more popular than we were.

[13:05] David Hein: So we did fine. We did fine. Everyone enjoyed our performances.

[13:10] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. We started a lot of licenses. And we're like, do we want to go to the soil dove in Colorado?

[13:16] David Hein: I think that's where it was.

[13:17] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. And also, can they afford us?

[13:19] David Hein: No. We afford it.

[13:20] Irene Sankoff: No. It just started to be like, oh, wait a second. Okay. I think this is taking on a life of its own. I can't get it out of my head, but do you ever realize City of Angels also a little bit influenced Wiccan Wedding, not so much Come From Away. You know, he's got the guy writing and he's telling the story.

[13:35] David Hein: Yeah, anyway. It was very us telling our story, which to me that's folk music singer songwriter, and to Irene, that's City of Angels.

[13:42] Irene Sankoff: That's so interesting. I just interviewed David Zippel a few weeks ago, so he'll be very interested to hear that.

[13:47] David Hein: Yeah, yeah. And strong teamo leads in City of Angels too. So this is your first experience with real people being characters in your play, including yourselves.

[13:56] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. Obviously, you've continued that with Come From Away. And those are living people who can come and see the show and either like it or not like it. How was that experience with your mothers?

[14:05] David Hein: We were really nervous about it. So, first of all, we wrote the whole script for My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding, and it was all fictionalized. It was all just based on the wheel. It was like mix-ups, mayhem and a gay wedding.

[14:15] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, to quote Drassy Chaperon.

[14:17] David Hein: Yeah. But someone told Irene what's so exciting about this is it's all true. And she came home and she was like, We need to change it all. We need to start over. And I was like, we can't, it can't be all true. It would have to be like this, and this, and this, and oh, this is actually really good. Wait, come over here. Let's keep working on this. And it became important to us that it was true. And we saw later that it had inspired many people to come up to us and say, This story helped me come out. It inspired people to get married and get engaged on our stage. That 70-year-old woman who she came up to Astrid, because Astrid was in My Mother’s uh Astrid Van Wirren, who's on Broadway with us, was in Wiccan Wedding back in Toronto. And this old woman actually came up to her and said something like, I'm 70 years old and I'm Jewish, and my daughter just married another woman, and I wasn't okay with it, and now I am. It was kind of amazing.

[15:02] David Hein: But the first people that we had to get their blessing from were my mom's. We had not expected to write a story about them, and suddenly we had written a story about them, and we sent the script to them and very nervously phoned them, and all we heard was laughter on the other end. They were howling and they couldn't believe that we were putting some of those stories on stage. I think they still can't, but they loved it, came from a place similar to Come From Away, that it was about celebrating them and celebrating their love. They come to see Wiccan Wedding, and they do this the same at Come From Away, and they sit in the front row and they hold hands and they sing along and are generally embarrassing. But I think we took that into Come From Away, which was our next project. It was the same thing, especially once we had met the people. The story for that is that we had come back to Toronto after performing it somewhere. I think it's Rochester.

[15:46] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, and we didn't know what our next project was. We didn't even know if we were gonna write another musical. And Michael Rubinoff, who's now a friend of ours, was just starting something called the Canadian Music Theatre Project at Sheridan College, which is an incredible program. You get five weeks there with a director with a cast of students that you get to work with and have so much energy. That was an opportunity to start doing a musical. We still hadn't agreed that this was a musical, but we wrote a grant at Grant Pitch anyway, saying we're gonna write a musical. I think it was called Gander at the time or C YQX or something.

[16:20] David Hein: 38 planes. We had terrible titles at the beginning. And we got the grant. We got to go out to Newfoundland on the 10th anniversary. We had never been there before, but it was this unique opportunity to interview not only the locals there who were in prime storytelling mode at the 10th anniversary, but also so many Come From Aways were returning.

[16:38] Irene Sankoff: I'm reporting live from New Finland for BBC.

[16:41] David Hein: CBC. CTV. Algas yeah. For Rogers TV, I'm Janice Mosher. On September 11th, 2011, the town is again filled with Come From Aways on the 10th anniversary from all around the world. We welcome back the playing people. And we got to interview them all, and it was this incredible experience. We interviewed everyone, literally from the flight attendant on our plane there to our hotel check-in person. And we felt a huge responsibility. You know, no one had ever handed us that much money before. And then as we did it, they invited us into their homes, they fed us, we got screeched in with them. We became friends with them and had such a good time. And when you're doing a show about people who you fall in love with, who you also think are incredibly generous, and you're telling a story about their generosity, it falls in the same line of you're telling their story in a way that you want to honor them and celebrate what they did.

[17:36] David Hein: At the style of a moment of the edge of the world, when the river meets the sea. Don't go away. Broadway Nation will be back right after this short break.

[17:59] Irene Sankoff: Welcome to the rough.

[18:01] David Hein: You had sort of the Come From Away experience yourselves there.

[18:04] Irene Sankoff: Well, exactly. Getting put up, and one time we were staying with this gentleman, and he was going off to his cabin to get away from it all. There was only one main street in this town, but they were going to their cabin, which was wow, we went there too, and it was I panicked. Like it's the middle of nowhere. But anyway, so he says you gotta lock the door, not because anything bad's gonna happen, but I just don't want you to be startled if someone comes in for a cup of tea, and I'm like, okay. And I guess we forgot to lock the door after letting the cats back in or something. Because the next morning, Buddy's sitting there having a cup of coffee, and like, oh, hi, definitely show you around.

I was waiting for you to wake up. And then it's like, oh, yeah, just randomly. I think they were related, but giving us a tour. Yeah, we saw that time and time again. People gave us presents, people offered us food. We were given the keys to the Cain family's house so generously, and they didn't even know us. They just said just feed the cats, and they left. It was amazing. It's still amazing to be able to celebrate what they did. I think a lot of times I've seen people question how real the generosity was and Come From Away. Seeing it ourselves, we just wanted to convey to people that this is possible, that it is real, and yeah, and we toned it down. Like that's the crazy part. To make it more palatable, we had to take it down a notch.

Like we actually had to be like, that's too sweet. You can't put that in because there's something wrong with our society, and you can show things as terrible as you want, but show something that's like a little bit too sweet, and suddenly people are freaking out. We had to take it down on the stuff. We often say that it says something about our society that we're so used to horrible things that when something wonderful comes up, when people are actually kind, we doubt it. We don't believe it.

[19:37] David Hein: Where did the idea for this come from? Did you remember this event? How did you go from even applying for this grant? What was the idea?

[19:45] Irene Sankoff: So we had been living in New York over 9-11. We moved down there when Irene got her master's in 1999, and we were staying at this residence for international graduate students called International House, which had a hundred and ten different countries represented there by 700 students. So we had this amazing international community that on that day when we were so worried, they came over to our door and knocked on us to check if we were okay. We all gathered around a piano. There was music and art that brought us together at that time. And it was an international community taking care of one another while we waited for news. My cousin was in the towers, but fortunately got out of there. We saw in the aftermath of that, like so many New Yorkers, we saw so much kindness in response to that.

People going back to the theater was a huge thing, but also people giving blood, people desperately trying to do something to help and to give back. When we talk to the Newfoundlanders later, what they say is that they were lucky that they were actually able to do something. And I think it in many ways, in those days afterwards, part of the universal story that we've seen around the world is people felt so helpless, but really, really wanted to help. And in that time, people actually thanked us in International House for taking the planes. We were Canadians, so they were thanking Canada. And we barely knew what they were talking about. But we were like, uh, sure, you're welcome. We great. But we were focused on what was happening there, obviously.

Years later, and actually it seemed to follow us a little bit in that Irene did a part in a TV movie where she played a flight attendant on one of the planes and to research for that. I remember listening to the transcripts of the phone calls.

[21:15] David Hein: Yeah.

[21:16] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. Then years later, our friend Michael, who we mentioned earlier, said, Do you know what happened in Gander? And do you think it would make a good musical? He had already approached, I think, five other writing teams.

[21:25] David Hein: Yeah.

[21:25] Irene Sankoff: And they had all said, That's a terrible idea. There's no way I'm going anywhere near that. But I think because of our experience in New York, because we had seen an international community that was responding with kindness, because we'd seen the kindness itself, and because we knew that there was no way we were going to tell a 9-11 story. We weren't telling a story about our experience in New York, except in the kindness that we had seen that was reflected in the story in Newfoundland. And it only grew from there. The grant application, it's similar in some ways to what you see on stage. We said, you know, it is gonna be bare bones. We're just gonna use chairs to tell the story. We are going to tell as many stories as we possibly could. We're gonna use Newfoundland music because I wanted to at that point. And eventually I convinced Irene that we oh my god, no, as soon as the band hit the stage, I was convinced.

[22:08] David Hein: That's all it took.

[22:09] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. And then once we got out there, that's what we set out to do. I often say that most great musicals start with what seems like a terrible idea. Right? Think of Les Mis. Les Mis is the terrible idea for a musical. It's a giant book that most people never make it through. It's three and a half hours long originally and written by French people who are not famous for writing musicals.

[22:29] David Hein: Yeah, yeah.

[22:32] Irene Sankoff: Now talk us through the highlights of this writing process. This is not an easy show, not an easy story. What even is the story? I'm sure you had to grapple with first. Give us a little of the play by play for that.

[22:44] David Hein: So the first thing we did, we spent almost a month out in Newfoundland and we talked about it non-stop. It's where we first heard the term Come From Away, and Irene suggested it as a title. It's where we were carefully writing down every single story we could and talking about how exciting it would be to tell all these stories. And we had pages and pages and pages, and while we were there, we started to lump them into stories about faith or stories about food or stories about music, trying to find some structure for it. And then we highlighted the stories that felt like more than just anecdotes. They were stories that had a beginning, a middle, and end. Beverly Bass's story had this rich, rich history, and then she had the experience of landing there, and then she had the experience of seeing her industry crumble, and then she returned. There was something sweeping about that. Nick and Diane came together separately with their separate histories, met each other, were pulled apart, and then came back again.

[23:35] David Hein: So it was stories like that that we sort of put at the top of our list, and then we realized that we could hang these other anecdotes along these spine stories.

[23:44] Irene Sankoff: We had a number of stories that we were gonna follow and everything else we could sort of put in, every little detail that we wanted to find a way in.

[23:51] David Hein: I think we just talked that through and talked that through forever.

[23:53] Irene Sankoff: Yeah.

[23:54] David Hein: And then began at the beginning.

[23:56] Irene Sankoff: And the first thing we wrote was Welcome to the Rock.

[23:59] David Hein: And it's very similar to the way it is, it's longer and the lyrics have changed a million times.

[24:04] Irene Sankoff: And yet, if you hear the original version on Come From Away, which we just put out, it's recognizable.

[24:09] David Hein: That's the first thing. I don't know if many people get this experience, but Welcome to the Rock was inspired by the navigator song, The Islander.

[24:16] Irene Sankoff: And then on Come From Away, we got the Navigators to sing Welcome to the Rock.

[24:20] David Hein: Welcome to the Touries and the Comframo Waves. Welcome to the local two of the stay my father, father, father's crutchy ship into this rock.

[24:31] Irene Sankoff: Welcome to the rock. Welcome to Newfoundland's either to Manhattan and it's too buyer land. You see no men's an island, but an island makes a man.

[24:38] David Hein: Especially when one comes to one like Newfoundland.

[24:45] Irene Sankoff: I listened to it the other day.

[24:46] David Hein: Sure.

[24:46] Irene Sankoff: Come From Away just a dream of mine for a while now. The original idea has always been with Come From Away to give back.

[24:52] David Hein: And part of that is inspired by the generosity that we saw there, but also that we're so thankful for the people there for giving us their stories.

[24:59] Irene Sankoff: And we've done that in many ways. We've used the show to donate to the SPCA there and to many charities across Newfoundland, starting from our very first workshop.

[25:06] David Hein: But we always thought if you love the music of Come From Away, if you love the world of Come From Away, you need to love the musicians who were originally inspired it.

[25:14] Irene Sankoff: We wanted to introduce the world to them. It was always a dream to see if they would do a Hamilton mixtape with Newfoundland artists and have them cover our songs.

[25:23] David Hein: You're plotting this album before we even had a script.

[25:28] Irene Sankoff: You were like, Why don't it be amazing? And I was like, We're reading a musical, not making an album. What's happening?

[25:33] David Hein: Yeah. I mean, this is me who grew up on folk music. I grew up on these bands and I got to hang out with them.

[25:38] Irene Sankoff: So it not only was that an amazing experience, but also it became collaborative. We dug into our old lyrics and we also wrote new lyrics, and they combined them with indigenous prayers from their own histories, and it was a really wonderful process to put it together.

[25:51] David Hein: Did you do that during the pandemic?

[25:53] Irene Sankoff: When did that all come together?

[25:54] David Hein: We did, yeah. And that was another part of it. It was just at a time when these musicians couldn't tour and couldn't make money.

[25:59] Irene Sankoff: We reached out to our record company. We said, Is now a good time that we can actually give them some money and they can record in their studios all over Newfoundland, and we can make this album this way, and it worked beautifully.

[26:09] David Hein: When you had the time to focus on it.

[26:11] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, exactly.

[26:12] David Hein: I am an islander!

[26:15] Irene Sankoff: To the fog and to the fairies and the dairies and the fame of distribution to the kitchen parties and one departed in her heart.

[26:20] David Hein: You never know we need a little bit of hell.

[26:26] Irene Sankoff: While we are the board with the relevant rock.

[26:35] David Hein: So now you're gathering these stories. I'm sure they're competing with one another to who's gonna get stage time as you're working on it.

[26:41] Irene Sankoff: We started off at Sheridan. The first draft that we brought in was We didn't finish it in the four hour rehearsal time. We didn't get through act one.

[26:49] David Hein: A lot of it was cutting it down. We did the first workshop, which became sort of the first half of the show.

[26:55] Irene Sankoff: It was about 45 minutes, but also included costume party, I remember.

[26:59] David Hein: And Stop the World.

[27:00] Irene Sankoff: And Stop the World. Yeah. We sort of had up to half of the show and then a couple other songs that we thought would fit in eventually.

[27:06] David Hein: But that was basically the NAMT cut.

[27:07] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. So what happened is we did it as a workshop at Sheridan. It went very well. Everyone responded really positively to it.

[27:14] David Hein: And then we had heard of NAMP. Michael had been down to NAMP and had suggested that we go down with him.

[27:19] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. We went down to watch the NAMP festival. We were like the only writers of other show, I think, sitting there.

[27:26] David Hein: You just heard David and Irene refer to NAMPT, which is industry shorthand for the National Alliance for Musical Theater, a not for profit organization that serves more than 200 theater companies, presenting organizations, higher education programs, and individual producers located in 33 states and abroad.

[27:45] Irene Sankoff: NAMPT Signature Event is its annual festival of new musicals, during which eight new musicals that have been selected through a careful and highly competitive process are then edited down to 45 minutes and presented as staged readings to an audience of producers, theater companies, and industry professionals.

[28:03] David Hein: Two other organizations that will come up in the conversation shortly are Junkyard Dog Productions and Goodspeed Musicals.

[28:10] Irene Sankoff: Junkyard Dog Productions is the Tony and Olivier Award-winning producing company that produced the Broadway hits Memphis and Come From Away. It was founded by Sue Frost, Randy Adams, and Kenny and Marlene Alhadiff.

[28:23] David Hein: And as you will hear, Kenny also is a longtime member of the Board of Trustees of the Fifth Avenue Theater in Seattle.

[28:29] Irene Sankoff: Goodspeed Musicals is the renowned theater company in Connecticut with a long and illustrious history of producing and developing new musicals, and which each year produces its own festival of new works.

[28:40] David Hein: All of these, NAMPT, Goodspeed, the Fifth Avenue Theater, Junkyard Dog, and the Canadian Music Theater Project at Sheridan College, where Come From Away began, are part of a small but vibrant network of organizations that are dedicated to developing new musicals and nurturing the next generation of musical theater artists.

[29:00] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, and no one knew who we were. We kept bothering them.

[29:01] David Hein: We bothered Sue Frost, but she was busy.

[29:05] Irene Sankoff: Uh-huh.

[29:05] David Hein: Yeah. So David is like remarkably optimistic. And he's like, I'm just gonna write everyone and see if they want to do this show.

[29:12] Irene Sankoff: And I'm like, damn it, no one's gonna write you back.

[29:14] David Hein: I did my research though. I researched all the theater companies and found out if they didn't workshops.

[29:20] Irene Sankoff: And one of the people I wrote to was Donalyn Hilton at Goodspeed.

[29:23] David Hein: And she wrote back almost immediately saying, We have this festival happening here as well. Would you like to be part of it?

[29:29] Irene Sankoff: Unfortunately, it was at exactly the same time that our next workshop of Come From Away was happening at Sheridan. And we were about to not do it.

[29:35] David Hein: We watched Michael, we're like, don't you worry, Michael, we're gonna do this workshop. We're gonna say no to Goodspeed, and then the phone starts ringing.

[29:42] Irene Sankoff: He's like, No, you're not.

[29:43] David Hein: Yeah, he was like, that's crazy. You don't say no to Goodspeed.

[29:46] Irene Sankoff: So we figured out a way to do it concurrently with students in both countries working on the show about cross-border collaboration.

[29:52] David Hein: At the time that we were video rehearsing and cut to now Zoom.

[29:56] Irene Sankoff: Car for the course now.

[29:57] David Hein: Yeah, of course.

[29:58] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. So we workshopped it there. That's where we got to the end of the show.

[30:01] David Hein: Two acts, two and a half hours, not three and a half hours, but two hours.

[30:04] Irene Sankoff: Yeah. We workshopped in both places. We did a recording at Sheridan because they had a recording studio there.

[30:09] David Hein: When we were at Goodspeed, Brandon Haldine, who was running the NAMPT festival at the time, walked by us and said, if you don't apply to my festival, you're dead to me.

[30:18] Irene Sankoff: And that was the only words he said to us.

[30:21] David Hein: So we applied and we got in, which was amazing in itself. And then I re-incented the final NAMP cut two days after giving birth to our daughter from a hospital room.

[30:30] Irene Sankoff: Yeah, I did that.

[30:31] David Hein: Oh, that poor kid. And NAMP'd was amazing. It reintroduced us to Junkyard Dog Productions.

[30:36] Irene Sankoff: When we first did My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding at the NAMP Festival, a stage manager, a friend of our family, introduced us to Sue and Randy at Junkyard Dog Productions just because he wanted us to know good people.

[30:49] David Hein: And then later, when they brought Memphis to Toronto, they invited us out for breakfast.

[30:53] Irene Sankoff: And it was actually the first day of our workshop of Come From Away, and we told them we were working on the show about Newfoundland over 9-11.

[31:00] David Hein: And they thought we were insane, but they were very sweet. And then they came to NAMP.

[31:04] Irene Sankoff: And Kenny Alhadiv was the first person at our table outside. You stand there hoping that someone's gonna come, and everyone came to introduce themselves, and it was wonderful.

[31:13] David Hein: We were really lucky that we had some incredible choices, and we went with the people who had made us laugh all along, who we had enjoyed breakfast with, who we wanted to get together with.

[31:21] Irene Sankoff: But having said that, they were really clear with us. They said we don't know if this is a Broadway show, we don't know if it'll ever go to Broadway.

[31:27] David Hein: It has no stars in it, it's a group musical. Everyone's gonna call it the 9-11 musical, which we have to overcome, and it has a title that no one can remember.

[31:34] Irene Sankoff: We started doing just readings and workshops.

[31:37] David Hein: I just want to sidebar. I will say there's something really comforting about that. You know, we've been through experiences before with Wick and Wedding, and we've come from a way where people were like, in order to make this commercial, you need to do this, this, and this.

[31:48] Irene Sankoff: And I was like, I don't ever want to make something up or say something happened that I can't confidently sit down and have coffee with Nick and Diane and say, So, this is what your story's doing now.

[31:59] David Hein: It wasn't worth it for us to compromise our relationships with these people in order to try to make something happen.

[32:07] Irene Sankoff: So change their stories to make it more commercial.

[32:10] David Hein: Yeah, we wanted them to tell us that we'd gotten it right. That was our main goal.

[32:13] Irene Sankoff: And everything else didn't matter. Our original thought was that Canadian high schools would be forced to do this show.

[32:19] David Hein: So everything else was gravy on top of that. I firmly believed that it would never be done in the States, but that's okay.

[32:24] Irene Sankoff: This is an important story to be out there. So there's something quite freeing about just doing the best story you can and not trying to make it into something.

[32:33] David Hein: We did one or two table reads, but then the first real workshop that we got to play with Chris Ashley, who was locked in his office by Donna Harrell, who told him you need to read the script and I'm locking you in until you read it.

[32:45] Irene Sankoff: Chris afterwards said, Okay, I want to do it.

[32:47] David Hein: Donna was like, Well, you have to interview first for it. He's like, What are you talking about? I haven't interviewed for anything.

[32:51] Irene Sankoff: And she's like, Well, these are Canadians who don't have any idea who you are, you have to interview for it.

[32:56] David Hein: Anyway, Chris was on board, and we brought on Kelly Devine and Ian Eisendrath because we were doing a workshop out at Fifth Avenue.

[33:03] Irene Sankoff: You came to Seattle, which was so exciting.

[33:04] David Hein: Of course, Kenny Alhadiv had a great deal to do with that. He not only advocated for the show with Sue and Randy, he advocated for the show with us as well.

[33:12] Irene Sankoff: He wouldn't shut up about it, in fact, which was and I hadn't been at NAMP. I missed NAMP that year for some reason.

[33:20] David Hein: And not having seen it, I'm sure I had the same hesitation that everybody else had when you just heard about it.

[33:25] Irene Sankoff: When you didn't have the opportunity to sit there and experience those incredible songs.

[33:29] David Hein: But even then, it took a while for people to latch on, and I'll admit I was one of them at the beginning.

[33:34] Irene Sankoff: But from the first day of the workshop in Seattle, it was clear that this was something amazing.

[33:53] David Armstrong: On the next episode of Broadway Nation, David, Irene, and I will continue our conversation as we follow the journey of Come From Away through its workshop in Seattle to its ultimate success on Broadway and around the world.

[34:07] David Armstrong: Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. If you enjoy this podcast, please follow, rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

[34:17] David Armstrong: This is by far one of the best ways to help other musical theater fans discover Broadway Nation.

[34:22] David Armstrong: Special thanks to Pals Mox, who helped me to edit this episode, KVSH 101.9, the voice of beautiful Vash on Island, Washington, and the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.

[34:36] David Armstrong: Ladies and gentlemen, let's your seatbacks and trade tables up back below us is the city where I grew up.

[34:43] David Armstrong: Coming round. That's the field when the wheels touch the ground for taxi. And we're all cheering, we're down, thanking everyone.

[34:50] David Armstrong: Thank you for flying over again. Back in the hug in the coolest home again. Pass the gate up the stairs. Hey, we're there. And he's waiting.

[35:09] David Armstrong: No, I'm fine, Tom. I'm fine.