'Come From Away,' grown in Greater LA
'West Side' moves, vaccine plays, 'Roxie' rocks, 'Adolescent Salvation,' plus more
“Come From Away” came from behind.
The small musical by Irene Sankoff and David Hein will be the most frequently produced show in American theater in the 2025-2026 season, according to the annual tally compiled by the magazine/website American Theatre (although the list-makers disqualify the perennial “A Christmas Carol”s).
“Come From Away” first opened at La Jolla Playhouse in 2015, but it had never previously appeared in the top 20 on AT’s list, even after it was nominated for five Tony awards on Broadway in 2017. In the AT article, its creators note that only recently did the show become available to independent producers who aren’t affiliated with the Broadway/touring version.
But that doesn’t explain why 23 companies quickly grabbed the opportunity to produce it.
Here are some big clues — “Come From Away” depicts how rural communities in Newfoundland, Canada organized a massive effort to assist the passengers and crews of the 38 flights that were diverted to their Gander airport on 9/11/01, after terrorists attacked New York. Even though the effort taxed these small towns, almost doubling the population overnight, “they stood together at a time when fear threatened to divide,” wrote Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2018, in his foreword to the published script of “Come From Away.”
In today’s fractured country to the south of Canada, our divider-in-chief — who is still facing criticism about his stated notion to somehow annex Canada as the 51st US state — usually isn’t in the mood for healing. His proposed healthcare cuts would literally do the opposite.
But many Americans across the political spectrum would like to believe that beneficial cooperation among strangers is still possible. The states with the highest number (3 each) of 2025-2026 productions of “Come Fly Away”: blue California and red South Carolina.
Greater LA saw the Broadway edition of “Come From Away” at the Ahmanson and Pantages theaters, but La Mirada Theatre has created our first home-grown version. The 12 cast members of Richard J. Hinds’s staging already play more than one character each, but here they also play instruments on stage, supplementing musical director Sam Groisser’s 10-piece backstage band. I shouldn’t single anyone out, but Misty Cotton’s terrific airline pilot is probably the performance you’ll remember the longest.
Scenic designer Nate Bertone filled in the backdrop with a lot of detail that the Broadway set lacked, and he created a wonderful rolling staircase that Hinds’ cast uses to great effect. “Come From Away” is a one-act musical, lasting about 95 minutes.
By the way, the Gander airport was also the site of a terrible airplane crash in 1985 that killed 248 US military personnel and eight crew members. Ice contamination was ruled the probable cause, but a minority report dangled the possibility of a bombing. The musical doesn’t mention any of this. But I wonder how many residents of the area in 2001 still remembered it — after only 16 years had passed. And then I wonder if the authors might eventually consider memories of this prior crash as a way to take a deeper dive into the material, if the musical ever begins to lose its current luster.
There’s a place for us
But the most prominent musical in LA right now is at…an opera house.
I generally don’t see LA Opera productions. Long ago I learned the custom that theater critics cover musicals, while music critics cover operas. But LA Opera is currently producing “West Side Story,” which is usually considered a musical. So I made a rare foray to the LA Opera venue, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, instead of its Music Center neighbors, the Taper and the Ahmanson.
I’m glad I saw choreographer Joshua Bergasse’s superb replication of Jerome Robbins’ original dances. I appreciated hearing the LA Opera orchestra playing Leonard Bernstein’s score — conducted by James Conlon in his 500th performance with LA Opera, before he is scheduled to retire after this season. But I sensed no electricity flowing between the two singers playing Tony and Maria — the descendants of Romeo and Juliet. As I noted in my last post, this is the fifth variation on the Romeo and Juliet story that the Music Center has hosted in only a little more than a year. Enough already.
Give me two more shots
Vaccines are in the news a lot these days, which makes two productions about them all the timelier.
“Eureka Day” at Pasadena Playhouse is the funnier — yes, funnier — of the two. It’s set in 2018, before COVID hit, at the private Eureka Day School in Berkeley. But we see no students. The characters are the school director and the parents who are on the school board.
The first scene, which pokes fun at the school’s wokeness, is too long and tangled. Part of this is inherent in the satire, but it slows the pacing in the Playhouse. The script says that the characters are in a circle in this scene, but that would be difficult on this proscenium-oriented stage, so they’re in an unlikely half-circle spread across the front of the stage, instead of directly in each other’s faces.
The play hits the top of the laugh meter in the third scene, as the director is trying to conduct an online meeting with all of the parents in response to a closure mandated by a mumps outbreak. The laughs are derived almost entirely from the onstage on-screen display of the increasingly rude comments from the at-home parents. But the biggest single laugh of the play is provoked by its final punchline, which of course I will not reveal in advance. Incidentally, “Eureka Day” is third on AT’s list of most planned productions this season.
Meanwhile, Darryl Vinyard’s “Right,” at the little Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks, strides more directly, with fewer distractions, into the heart of the vaccines controversy. Two related husband/wife couples (the two men are brothers) first celebrate the news that one of the wives is pregnant for the first time, then enter the combat zone over whether the unborn infant will be able to socialize with a cousin who hasn’t been fully vaccinated and might have spread measles to a baby, causing permanent disabilities. Other factors later enter the dispute — issues of class and income. It’s a one-act taking place in real time, and director Bryan Rasmussen’s cast pulls no punches.
Mamma and Grandmamma mie
Grandmothers, mothers and their progeny are evergreen theatrical themes, and here are three current examples.
In the solo “Am I Roxie?” at Geffen Playhouse, Roxana Ortega traces how she and her mother became closer to each other as her mom descended into dementia before dying. This sounds grim, but Ortega is a powerful performer who knows precisely how to create laughs when they help and how to rein them in when they might seem intrusive. I laughed a lot, but I also came close to crying. And Bernardo Cubría’s direction and the design components help fill up the Geffen’s larger space.
Tim Venable’s “Adolescent Salvation,” in the smaller space upstairs at Rogue Machine on Melrose, initially appears to be about three teenagers hanging out together in one of their bedrooms. But the mother of the hosting teenager eventually appears and becomes an important part of a surprising scenario. I appreciated the moments of chaos in this narrative; they were convincing enough yet also unexpectedly farcical at times. And the venue’s extreme intimacy, as created by director Guillermo Cienfuegos and set/lighting designer Joel Daavid, enhances every twist and turn. The play features a lot of cellphone use in a dark space — the dominance of online phone culture is a given — so please make sure you keep your own phone out of reach. Instead, concentrate on the in-person action, just a few feet away from you.
In Brian Quijada’s “Fly Me to the Sun,” at the Fountain Theatre, the story hinges on a Salvadoran abuelita who goes to Illinois to help raise her grandsons. For whatever reason, no actress plays this role. Instead, the character is embodied by a goofy puppet in the hands of a young male actor playing a grandson who also voices her lines. I found the gimmickry distracting as well as somewhat distasteful. By the way, the script subtitle is “a solo puppet play,” yet there is a second actor/technician on stage, who says hardly anything but concentrates on the excessive tech trimmings. The Fountain’s new artistic director Raymond O. Caldwell directed.
Boo! Or is it ‘bore’?
Two current productions have ties to late-19th-century British fiction about supernatural happenings.
“My Spirits Soar”, at Group Rep in North Hollywood, uses the basic outline of Oscar Wilde’s story “The Canterville Ghost” to create a newish musical. Wilde’s “Canterville” has been adapted often in various media, sometimes set in more recent eras. This Adryan Russ/Doug Haverty project is one of those updates, in which an American student is on a work/study junior-year-abroad program in England. Her “work” consists of chores in the maintenance of the Canterville castle, which of course is haunted by a crotchety ghost. The same Russ/Haverty team did an earlier version of the material, titled “iGHOST,” at Lyric Theatre on LaBrea in 2011. Unfortunately my spirits did not soar during “My Spirits Soar.” It’s too long, too clunky — a “chore” to sit through.
Aaron Henne’s “Dracula Annotated,” from the theatre dybbuk company (yes, the company name is always lower-case), is less of an adaptation and more of a staged treatise on the subject of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” in First Congregational Church’s imposing Shatto Chapel — north of Lafayette Park, between the Koreatown and Westlake neighborhoods.
Even though the actors speak quite fast, perhaps too fast at times, the performance I saw lasted more than three hours. The script sounds somewhat disorganized — perhaps as if the audience were a class that was expected to have read the novel in advance of the performance. A cast of five, clad in white, manipulate white boxes and red scarves as they talk, with women taking many of the novel’s men’s roles and vice versa. The day after seeing the show, I read the article about Dracula in Wikipedia and felt better informed than I had from the three-hour play.
Because I’m discussing plays with supernatural elements, I should also mention N. T. Vandecar’s “Otherkin,” at the Road in North Hollywood, featuring a teenager who believes she’s a dragon and that the end of the world is imminent. Meanwhile, she has just met her biological father and his husband. The fantasy and the realism don’t blend well. It’s set in London, but not everyone in the cast seems to remember this when they speak.
A long ‘Iguana’
Tennessee Williams’ “Night of the Iguana,” staged by Jessica Kubzansky at Boston Court in Pasadena, lasts almost 2 hours, 45 minutes. It trudges rather than soars. The lyricism is too languorous. At least the appearances of German tourists — on the west coast of Mexico, in 1940 — occasionally remind us of what was happening outside the insular concerns that dominate most of the play.