Taking Come From Away to the Beach: Kelly Devine Directs the Musical on Cape Cod

Kelly Devine has seen Come From Away hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

Working on the show virtually since its inception, Devine has choreographed it out-of-town, on Broadway, on tour, in London, for Apple TV+. You name it, she’s been there, working alongside her longtime collaborator, director Christopher Ashley.

This summer, Devine takes the driver’s seat as director of Come From Away at the Cape Playhouse through August 30, assembling a new creative team and a cast made up of veterans and newcomers. While there are indeed new elements to this staging, Devine says that the vocabulary of the show she built from the ground up is more-or-less the same.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be a few surprises in store, though…

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Tell me about how this production of Come From Away at Cape Playhouse came to be.
I got a call from Eric Rosen, the artistic director, and he asked if I would be interested in directing Come From Away. And I said yes…And then I remembered that it was at the beach, and I was like “I will absolutely do that.” I’ve known Eric for a long time, so I was thrilled that he reached out to me.

I would never say no to working at the beach.
Exactly. And that’s how I got all the actors to come, as well. Some of them I just called, saying, “Do you want to go to the beach?” And they’re like, “Yeah!?” And then I’m like “Great, we’re going to do Come From Away.” At one point, I saw Joel Hatch when Christopher Ashley was getting the Mr. Abbott Award, and I had already asked him to do it, and he came up to me and was like, “Kelly, thank you so much. My wife is so excited to be at the beach for four weeks.”

Love Joel Hatch.
Joel has taken it upon himself to be the Mayor of everybody. He wants to be like a dance captain or something. He’s having the best time.

Having been part of the show from the very beginning, you obviously know its vocabulary and structure from top to bottom. How do you go about rethinking it or reimagining it as a director this time, with a whole new design team and new actors?
We’re playing with little things, but it’s basically the same structure. We have different actors who have their own stamps, but as far as trying to reinvent the wheel, we’re pretty much doing what we did before. It’s going really smoothly. The show is so, so dense. There are pass-offs everywhere, sneaky things that you put into somebody else’s pocket. That’s the stuff that gets hard.

Are there things you always wanted to do in the original production that you couldn’t, and a are implementing now?
To be honest, not really. We spent so much time working on it before we got to Broadway. Christopher Ashley and I were holding hands the whole time. I pretty much knew what he was thinking, and he knew what I was thinking when we were making it. The producers let us get through all that stuff in workshops and the out-of-town runs. This production is going to be much more in your face. They’re basically at the edge of the stage all the time. It’s tight.

Is this the first production of the show you’ve done without a turntable?
I actually already did that when the tour went out.

Does that mean you have to reimagine all of the movement vocabulary?
No, we just weave them through the chairs, putting in new patterns that end up with all of them at the edge of the stage.

When Chris first called me about the project, he asked me what I thought the movement would be. I put together a whole collage of things. I got pictures of people waiting for the subway or waiting to get on a plane. People sleeping. I put together this tableau through one of the songs and sent that to them and they were like “I get what you’re doing.”

That was the hook, and it just went from there. It’s so funny; I choreographed every single bit of it. Once I do that, though, I don’t remember it anymore. It goes into this weird little bubble. It all comes out and I’m like “Great, there it is.” I can say when it’s wrong, but I couldn’t put it back together if my life depended on it, because I have other sections to think about. My associates, Ricky and Jenna, come in and put it back together. 

You’ve got some great Come From Away newcomers working on this production, too, like Kelli Barrett, who’s playing Beverly.
Absolutely. I’ve worked with her many times, and she’s lovely. Christiani Pitts is really good in this. Everybody’s really good. And I think everybody’s having a good time, but we’re at the point where everyone’s a little bit nervous. They don’t have it all under their belts yet. Everybody knows what it is, but now it’s getting it in their bodies and making sure of, “I set this on chair four.” Those are the things that are unnerving.