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Ballroom at Assembly Rooms
Bryan had mentioned something about this one touching on 9/11 before we went in, and that was pretty much the sum total of what I knew walking into the Ballroom at Assembly Rooms. Turns out that was the perfect way to see it.
Here’s the premise, in case you’re as in the dark as I was: after the towers fall, every aircraft over the Atlantic gets grounded, immediately, no exceptions. A small town in Newfoundland called Gander suddenly finds itself hosting over 7,000 stranded passengers, more than doubling its population overnight, while the rest of the world watches America reel from the towers. It’s a genuinely different lens on that day. Not the towers, not New York, but the ripple that reached a tiny Canadian town nobody had heard of and turned it into an accidental sanctuary.
And the performance absolutely delivers on that premise. Strong doesn’t quite cover it. Every single actor was on point, and a few of them were clearly so invested in the story they were telling that you could see it getting to them up there, real emotion bleeding through the performance rather than just being acted at you.
I went from properly laughing to properly welling up more times than I can count, hooked from the opening number and never once let go. By the time the lights dropped, the standing ovation wasn’t just earned, it was inevitable.
This is a Fringe production and it’s already this good, so I’m now on a mission to track down the full-scale version, because if this is the taster, the main course must be something else entirely.
If you get the chance to see this story in any form it comes in, go.