NEW YORK—On Friday night, Lee MacDougall stepped into an icy wind just outside the Schoenfeld Theatre, having just finished a boisterous preview performance of Come From Away, the feel-good musical about the uncommon hospitality of Gander, N.L., when it suddenly welcomed nearly 7,000 airplane passengers diverted there after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York in 2001.

MacDougall, who plays Nick, an uptight Brit who finds his soulmate there, was greeted with cheers by a hundred or so fans, and a question.

“Does that happen every night?” asked Bob Kay, who had travelled with his family from New Hampshire to see the show. He was talking about the standing ovation, an exuberant, extended affair egged on by a Newfoundland musical jamboree.

“Yup. It does,” shrugged MacDougall, almost a little sheepish. “Never gets old, let me tell you.”

Kay, who had seen the show on Tuesday as well, could confirm. That night, “the audience would start spontaneously clapping mid-performance,” Kay said. “It made some of it hard to hear.”

Ahead of the Broadway debut of "Come From Away," the musical's cast and creators recounted where they were on Sept. 11. Co-creator David Hein says his cousin was in the World Trade Center during the attacks.

As debuts go, Come From Away’s has been a long one. But two years of tours, tests and previews have finally landed it here: On Broadway, and the early signs are good. Sold-out previews, standing ovations, and throngs of fans waiting outside, wanting to talk. But there’s some anxiety, too.

“I’m sure there are some people here who aren’t ready to see this,” said Irene Sankoff, who wrote the show with her husband, David Hein. “There might be some people who are never ready, and that’s fair enough.”

When the show first arrived in New York, they made an appeal: For the initial preview performance in February, they invited emergency first responders, their families, survivors and the Fire Department of New York.

“It was a terribly nervous moment,” Sankoff said. The next day, they received a package: Dozens of FDNY hats, and a thank you.

“They said it felt like a tribute to the people they had lost, and that we were part of their family now,” Hein said.

Sankoff nodded. “I keep reminding myself: They didn’t have to do that,” she said. “They wanted to. And that feels so good.”

Earlier in the week, Hein and Sankoff were holed up in the Schoenfeld, a century-old Broadway playhouse with gilded trim and cool blue walls, going over changes for the night’s performance. A lumpy package wrapped in brown paper was waiting for Sankoff there, postmarked from Newfoundland. She tore through layers of unwieldy tape to finally extract a pair of things: A tiny painting of a rocky shoreline, and a pin cushion, hand-embroidered, with the logo that has come to define the universe that she and Hein have lived in the past four years.

“Come From Away,” it read, in familiar blue and gold, a little globe rendered in tight, soft tufts.

“Awww,” giggled Sankoff, holding it up for Hein, who laughed. “It’s a lot better than more cat soap,” a fan favourite care package she receives a little too often. (“People know I have cats,” she shrugs.)

If Toronto — where their two cats are being cared for by friends — is their first home, then Gander, where the couple and writing team spent weeks in 2011 collecting stories of locals and arrivals to eventually write Come From Away, is surely their second.

With any luck, New York will be their third. After two weeks of previews here, with Sankoff and Hein smoothing and tweaking day by day, the show was locked Friday night: No more changes, a finished product for the world to see, and critics to judge, this week.

Come From Away has defied convention, and odds, since the beginning. An uproariously funny musical about one of the most devastating moments in recent history is nothing if not unorthodox. At the same time, its remarkable poise — gravity amid the merriment, a story of humanity’s best impulses rising to meet its worst — has left a wake of acclaim.

In the fall, two charity shows in Gander were explosive, feel-good affairs.

“We went there to get the OK — we wanted them to be proud of it, and give us permission to tell their story,” says Caesar Samayoa, one of the cast. “I still get goosebumps thinking about it.”

During its recent eight-week Toronto run, people camped out overnight for its final performances. Some saw it a half-dozen times or more.

All in, the show grossed almost $10 million in its short run — enough for Mirvish Productions, its Toronto host, to bring it back next January for an unlimited engagement. It will run “as long as audiences want it,” said Mirvish’s John Karastamatis. “We estimate a minimum of one year.”

Still, New York is a famously tougher crowd. More than a dozen new musicals open this season, competing for audience.

“In the theatre it feels very safe, and we’re just continuing to make it better and better and stronger and stronger,” Hein says. “And then you walk outside and you’re like oh my God – it’s Broadway!”

The modest production might seem a tough sell next to, say, musical adaptations of Groundhog Day, Amelie and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, all opening this month. And some theatregoers may be unwilling to see a show, however hopeful, that unearths such painful memories.

Come From Away has been through this before, at every stage of its journey. When it began development at Sheridan College’s Canadian Music Theatre Project more than four years ago, it was with a delicate sense of respect for the emotions it would inevitably touch.

“We’re very sensitive about using trigger words — we don’t say ‘World Trade Center,’ for example, until the very end. We wanted to create a safe space,” Hein says.

As embraced as it has been so far, Sue Frost knows these are early days.

“You just never know. You really don’t,” Frost sighed, just before a sold-out matinee preview performance last Wednesday. Frost, one of the producers with Junkyard Dog, which brought the show here, is a Broadway veteran with enviable laurels to her credit. In 2010, Junkyard Dog won a Tony Award for Memphis for best musical of the year.

Come From Away is a different sort of gamble, one that’s taking on new resonance that a few years ago would have been impossible to predict.

Suddenly, this joyous musical seems like a big-hearted Canadian antidote to President Donald Trump’s divisive leadership, opening just three weeks after his proposed travel ban on visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

In one powerful scene set in a church, a man sings “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace,” a Catholic hymn (“Where there is hatred/let me bring your love,” he sings). He’s joined by an Orthodox rabbi, singing a prayer in Hebrew, and a Muslim, kneeling on his mat for his daily prayers. By song’s end, they all share the stage in perfect harmony.

The show’s sudden timeliness introduces, for Frost, a new dilemma. “The very thing you think — ‘Well it’s such a great opportunity to have a good story at a bad time’ — someone else might see it as opportunistic,” she sighs. “You just don’t know.”

What they do know is something a little easier to see. “The other actor in this is really the audience. We speak directly to them,” says Samayoa. “You’ll often see people afterwards, just crying.”

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The characters he plays — one half of a gay couple both named Kevin (“it was cute for a while,” quips the other Kevin at one point) and, critically, Ali, an Egyptian Muslim traveling alone, who is shunned and subject to suspicion and a brutal search — have meant experiences far outside the usual actor-fan encounter.

“I feel a huge responsibility to do it right,” he says. After every performance, people throng the stage door, waiting for the actors to emerge. Some of them had seen three or four previews, he says.

“It’s not an autograph and a handshake — they really want to tell you: ‘You showed my story up there. You showed it,’” he says. “And it’s OK, because we need to talk, too. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. ”

Come From Away has had practice treading softly, even in this fraught terrain. The show went to Washington, D.C., for a brief run on the 15th anniversary of the attacks, in September of last year.

“It allowed us to see, in a town that was also directly attacked, ‘Does that change how an audience watches our show?’” said director Christopher Ashley.

“And there were definitely tonalities and nuances that we adjusted to try to take care of people who were directly affected. There were a couple of jokes we cut along the way. We decided those are great jokes, but maybe not right now.”

A new layer of tough political reality hasn’t meant specific changes, but a deeper sense of pride. “Whenever you do a show, I think the audience brings in the lens of whatever is happening at that moment,” Ashley says.

“I think we’re all very glad to be telling a story right now about generosity to strangers, and what it’s like to take care of each other.”

The sudden political shift caught the production off guard, as it did almost everyone else. When Trump won, defying the polls, the show was in the midst of its Toronto run. Arriving in New York has given it an added a layer of urgency.

“The show was not written at a time that we knew we would be coming into this political environment — even though it feels like it was,” Samayoa says. “This notion of helping somebody in need rather than choosing fear — it’s always been a part of the show, but now it feels like it’s our driving force, every night.”

For Sankoff and Hein, it’s a homecoming in more ways than they expected. In 2001, the couple lived on the Upper West Side in International House, a residence for international graduate students. Sankoff was completing her masters, while Hein worked for her uncle, who ran a studio that made music for Disney productions and the Muppets.

The day of the attacks, they huddled with dozens of students from all over the world, cobbling community from what was at hand to ward off the fear. It was, in many ways, a catalyst for what Come From Away eventually became: A gently urgent plea for hope amid despair, for unity and kindness in the hardest of moments.

If now feels a little like then, then maybe Come From Away is exactly where it is meant to be.

“We have this memory — we were so good to each other and we want to remember how inspiring that was,” Hein says. “There’s never a bad time to talk about these things and tell a good story.

“But it feels like right now it’s important to tell a story about coming together. Whether it was the people coming off the planes, or the people who welcomed them, there was a benefit from the kindness for both sides. That seems like something worth remembering.”

On Friday night, the show locked and ready for the critics, the cast barreled through a performance – laughs hitting hard, and loud, right where they needed to – that landed firmly in a standing ovation, the crowd cheering and clapping along to a Newfoundland musical jam and two curtain calls.

As the crowd started to filter out, Mindy Davis, a New Yorker, let go an enormous sigh.

“I had no idea what to expect,” she said, eyes wide. “All I knew was that this was the 9/11 musical. I had friends who had seen it three times already who told me, ‘Don’t listen to the album.’ They didn’t want to ruin it for me. But it’s amazing. It takes you back, but it’s also right here. It’s just so relevant right now.”

As cast members emerged from the stage door one by one, to cheers each time, they chatted amiably with fans and signed autographs. Samayoa, wading through the crowd, arrived to greet a young Indian man who had been to the show several times before. He gives him a hug, tells him he looks forward to seeing him again (“See? I told you,” Samayoa says).

As the cast works its way through the crowd – chatty, unhurried, happy to be there – small groups linger despite the cold. “It needs to run forever, because it’s so relatable,” said Natalie Szczerba a New Yorker. “It’s totally universal.”

Rebecca Schafer, one of her friends, still seemed a little shell shocked. “And how relevant is it right now?” she said. “I mean, we have a travel ban. How important is it to know, right now, that people can be kind to each other and show their best instead of their worst?”

Dana Cullinane, a friend in her group, agreed. “I didn’t know anything about it, but I had friends who had seen it and said it was life-changing,” she said, nodding quickly. “They were right.”

Come From Away is in previews until Saturday, March 11, and opens Sunday, March 12, at Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45th St., in New York. For tickets see www.comefromaway.com

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