Come From Away Returns to Ford's Theatre
A decade after Washington audiences first saw it, Come From Away comes back to the stage where it began its climb toward Broadway. Ford's Theatre opens its 2026-2027 season with the Tony Award-winning musical, running September 10 through October 18, 2026, in a run that coincides with the 25th commemoration of September 11.
On September 11, 2001, U.S. airspace closed and 38 planes were diverted to Gander, a small town on the island of Newfoundland. The 6,579 passengers on board effectively doubled the town's population overnight. Gander and the surrounding communities fed them, housed them, found them clothes and phones and showers, and kept them company for five days while the world waited.
Come From Away tells that story in 100 minutes with no intermission. A small ensemble plays both the stranded passengers and the townspeople who took them in, switching between the two dozens of times over the course of the evening. The score draws on Newfoundland folk music, with fiddle, bodhran, accordion and whistle sitting alongside a rock rhythm section. The show is not a 9/11 memorial piece in the way that description might suggest. It is funny more often than it is solemn, and its subject is less the attacks themselves than what people did next.
Ford's Theatre is part of this musical's origin story. Written by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, Come From Away was developed at the Canadian Music Theatre Project at Sheridan College in Ontario, then appeared at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre's Festival of New Musicals in 2013. It had its world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in 2015 in a co-production with Seattle Repertory Theatre. Its next stop was Ford's Theatre, where it played September 2 through October 16, 2016, to sold-out houses. The D.C. run was followed by an engagement at Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theatre, and then Broadway, where it began performances in February 2017 and opened that March at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.
The show earned seven Tony nominations, including Best Musical, and won the Tony for Best Direction of a Musical. It also collected four Helen Hayes Awards here in Washington, including Outstanding Production of a Musical, and four Olivier Awards in London, including Best New Musical. It went on to run more than five years on Broadway, plus national tours, a London production and a filmed version. So the 2026 engagement is a homecoming in a real sense. This is the theatre where D.C. audiences met the show before the rest of the country did.
Ford's Theatre is offering tickets to the first preview performance free of charge through a TodayTix lottery. The Free Preview program has provided more than 11,000 tickets to Washington audiences since it launched in 2016. Discounts are available for groups, seniors and military personnel, and group sales can be reached at groups@fords.org. A sensory-friendly performance is scheduled for Saturday, October 17, 2026. These relaxed performances are designed for audience members with sensory sensitivities, including people with autism and other social, learning or cognitive disabilities, and Ford's has offered them since 2018. Audio description, open captioning and Braille programs are available on request.
Come From Away is one of the few musicals of the last decade that works equally well for people who go to the theatre every month and people who go once a year. It is short, it is fast, it does not ask you to know anything going in, and it leaves most audiences in better shape than it found them. Seeing it at Ford's, in a season timed to the 25th anniversary of the events it describes, adds something that a touring stop in a large road house cannot.