Greatest Hits Two: “Welcome to The Rock”

For the next blog, we’re throwing the spotlight onto a fairly new addition to the Bristol Show Choir repertoire: “Welcome to The Rock” from Come from Away!

This musical, with book, music and lyrics by Irene Sankoff and David Hein is set during the week following the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, where 38 planes were diverted to Gander in Newfoundland, and the town welcomed the “Come from Aways” as they waited for news. Characters are based on real life Gander residents and the passengers they helped. Friendships are formed, even a romance between Nick, an English passenger, and Diane, an American that became a marriage that is still going strong to this day! 

Come from Away started life in 2012, where it was workshopped in Ontario. The following few years saw the show enjoy record breaking runs in California, Seattle, Washington, and Toronto before premiering on Broadway on March 12th, 2017, where it regularly plays to standing room only audiences, even during previews. It opened in the West End in  February 2019, where it calls the Phoenix Theatre home.

“Welcome to the Rock” is the opening number of the show, where the Newfoundlanders talk about life in Gander, and heralds the arrival of the people that changed this community overnight and always. We at Bristol Show Choir are immensely proud to celebrate a musical that its core celebrates human kindness in the darkest of times, and we always enjoy singing it. We’ve carried it over from a previous term, and thanks to the pandemic hadn’t had many opportunities to sing it together and polish it the way we know we can, so we’re delighted it made our Top Ten. 

The score for the show is choc full to the brim with Celtic folk rock, world music and British Isles influences, and “Welcome to the Rock” shows this from the outset. It feels quite upbeat generally, until the break section, which sees a dramatic shift in tone and speed, then switches back. There’s some harmonies in the break that the Sopranos get to lead us in with, that send shivers down our spine, but throughout the song there’s a strong temptation to speed up, which means we can lose diction and clarity of the lyrics, but as our confidence with the song continues to grow, we’ll have it under control soon enough…

Next time, we discuss our love of a medley with a little help from a Broadway smash hit…