I love musicals. I unabashedly love musicals. Ever since I was warned that there was trouble (TROUBLE!) right here in River City, the idea that regular people just walking through their normal, day to day life, then suddenly breaking out into song, well, I've always felt like that was a beautiful way to imagine the world, and it was a world I wanted to belong to.
I get obsessed with musicals. Chess, for instance, was a huge part of my life for a lot of years. Today, listening to Chess makes me sad, it could have been one of the greats. It should have been. It's got great ingredients, but nobody has been able to mix them and cook them and present them in the way that is coherent. The best songs, one of the most poorly told stories.
Hamilton was my most recent obsession. My sister had been into Hamilton for years, and would often play me songs from it just to get me interested. But, no dice, the perennial hipster in me recoiled at liking something that everyone else liked. It probably wasn't until I saw Lin-Manuel Miranda's Monologue on SNL that I finally caved. And began having H on non-stop rotation for about three, maybe four weeks. It was brutal. But glorious.
Come From Away is quickly becoming my new obsession. You know that one moment on a roller coaster, after the long, agonizingly slow ascension, you finally get to the top, the highest point on the ride, and then for a brief, subtle moment, the cars slow down even more, right as they are starting to go over the hump, into that mad, fever dream of a rocket ride downward? That's exactly where I am with Come From Away.
If you don't know what Come From Away is about, here's a brief intro.
Come From Away is about "good". And not even, really, "good" in the face of "evil", nothing that hackneyed or simple. Sure, the other words you can use to describe what happened in Gander, Newfoundland, on that fateful Tuesday would be "caring", "compassionate", "remarkable", "wholesome", "inspiring", sure, they all fit, to a degree. But I would prefer to boil it all down to it's essence, which is goodness. It's about the "good".
And maybe that is something we are all overlooking these days. We are so focused on opposites, "Left vs Right", "Liberal vs Conservative", "Traditional vs Progressive", we are bombarded with text and images every moment and it feels like we are being forced, sometimes even against our will, to make choices, to embrace or protest, to accept or reject, to believe or to dismiss. Come From Away only wants us to spend some time soaking in a pool of good. Good people, good actions, good intentions, good feelings. Good music. Good songs. Good vibes.
God I love this musical. Check it out, please.
