Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre lands hit musical Come From Away for 2017-18 season

Winnipeggers will be among the first Canadians to see a hit homegrown musical set around the 9/11 attacks. 

Come From Away will make a landing at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre as part of its 2017-18 season, Winnipeg's largest theatre announced Monday.

The musical, by Canadian writers Irene Sankoff and David Hein, will run at RMTC from Jan. 12 to Feb. 3, 2018, part of a co-production with Toronto's Mirvish Productions and Junkyard Dog Productions, the company behind the hit. 

It will follow the Winnipeg run with a return to Toronto, where it ran from November 2016 until January of this year, breaking box-office records at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

RMTC announced most of its season in February, but left the January slot "TBA."

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"For the first time in my 28-year tenure as artistic director, we announced our season with a TBA," RMTC's Steven Schipper said in a media release. "We can think of few other projects that would have been worth the wait."

The musical tells the story of airline passengers who took refuge in Gander, N.L., when their planes were grounded by the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S. More than 6,500 passengers landed in Gander and were welcomed by residents, who offered food, accommodations and assistance over the course of three days while commercial flights were grounded. 

• 'I'll never forget': Gander remembers 9/11, 15 years later
• Gander on 9/11 told 'you were the best of us'

The musical premiered in California in 2015, and has since gone on to runs in Seattle, Toronto and a stop for two concert performances in Gander last year.

It's currently running on Broadway — a rare example of a Canadian-made musical making it to the Great White Way. It's received mostly positive reviews, a visit from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this month, multiple award nominations, and its cast even landed on the pages of Vanity Fair.

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But the RMTC run will be Come From Away's first at a regional Canadian theatre.

"Royal MTC has been a longtime partner and friend," Mirvish Productions' David Mirvish said in a release, "so we are very happy to have our new company [perform] this extraordinary musical play in Winnipeg first."

• Read more CBC coverage of Come From Away