quillori

Let me start with the wham line: I did stand up at the end for OSF's production of Come From Away. The book is just that good, and the ensemble cast is also just that good. (The production as a whole is not perfect, but we'll get to that in a minute.)

I should note here that this was my first proper encounter with Come From Away. I know I watched the Tony broadcast the year the show premiered, and was very broadly familiar with the real-world inspiration for its creation, but till today I'd never seen it staged. Nonetheless, I went in predisposed to be touched; just looking over the director's notes in the playbill was enough to make me tear up a bit while waiting for the house lights to dim, and I remained emotionally invested in the action onstage throughout.

If you're somehow not familiar with this musical, it's set in the very real Very Small Town of Gander in Newfoundland, which happens to have one of the world's largest airfields in its back yard, and which was therefore suddenly tasked to accept seven thousand abruptly diverted airline passengers being redirected away from NYC on September 11, 2001. By rights this should have been a recipe for disastrous levels of chaos and strife - but instead it laid the foundation for perhaps the all-time greatest and most successful act of community service in modern history.

Structurally speaking, it is also by many standards a very odd musical. For one thing, it's a genuine ensemble cast - at least half the players arguably qualify as co-leads, and there are almost no pure solo numbers in the whole show. It's also relatively short, at least here at OSF, with a brisk 100-minute run time.

But short or not, the book and lyrics are brilliantly written, the characters (virtually all of them based on real-life stranded passengers and local Gander residents) are all drawn with a thoughtful mix of humor and heart, and every cast member is up to the challenge of playing double or triple roles on both sides of the cultural divide.

I have only one significant criticism, but it's one that's been a recurring issue with OSF's stage musicals in recent years: the sound levels for the orchestra have been set one or two degrees stronger than those for the vocals . . . and that, for Comes From Away, as full of ensemble pieces as it is, often makes it very difficult for the singers' words to reach the audience as clearly as they should. Given that there's evidently no published edition of the script for viewers to consult in order to get the full benefit of the show's lyrics - or so I was told by the OSF gift shop, which routinely carries printed editions of most of the shows the Festival produces - this is a serious and frustrating problem.

But even accounting for that complaint, Come From Away comes in at a solid 9.8 out of 10 (and feels especially relevant just now in light of current real-world events). This one is worth coming from away to southern Oregon, all by itself.

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I can't say the same for You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World!. Indeed, the kindest thing I can say is that this play - a nearly new show written and first produced in a much smaller venue just last year - and I are catastrophically incompatible.

First, I'm a very hard sell for embarrassment-driven comedy, and there's a great deal of it here. I'm an equally hard sell for comedy that treats seriously dysfunctional family environments with what feels like caricature as opposed to characterization - and too much of what I saw onstage felt to me like caricature, particularly of the play's most openly queer character. I'm also inherently wary of scripts that wade heavily into preaching their social agendas, and this script leans very hard on climate change issues throughout. Finally, one major plot line involves one of the leads being diagnosed with - and ultimately dying from - stage IV pancreatic cancer . . . which is, as it happens, precisely what took my father some years ago.

Ultimately, at least for me, You Are Cordially Invited... is trying to juggle far too many balls at once, and thereby failing to do justice to any of its characters and themes. It doesn't help that the play breaks the fourth wall right from the start, introduces a version of real-life climate activist Greta Thunberg as an onstage presence - "character" isn't quite the right word here - and makes an abrupt and tonally odd left turn into a more serious vein at the very end. [In particular, I would refer readers to Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" novels as a far better and more cohesive treatment of similar themes, and A Wizard's Dilemma in particular as an immensely more mature treatment of a parental cancer diagnosis.]

It's only fair to note that the Friday evening audience with whom I saw the show was, as a whole, a good deal more enthusiastic than I was (that being said, I will also note that a sizeable chunk of that audience, in the Festival's intimate Thomas Theater, was made up of a young student tour group, whose theatrical instincts were necessarily far less jaded than mine). And as virtually all of my objections are at the scripting level, I can't fault the actors for doing their best with the material they were given.

Fortunately for OSF audiences, Festival productions very rarely misfire as badly as I think this one did - and I don't doubt there are viewers who will disagree with my views of the show). But this is one case where I would recommend skipping the play entirely, and that's a call I don't make lightly.