The Opelika High Theatre Society opens its 2026-2027 season with one of the most acclaimed musicals of the past decade — and one of the hardest to pull off. Come From Away runs for six performances beginning Friday, Sept. 25, at the Opelika Center for the Performing Arts on the Opelika High School campus, 1700 Lafayette Parkway.
Tickets are $15 for adults and $10 for students, available on GoFan.com and at the door.
The performance schedule
- Friday, Sept. 25 — 7 p.m.
- Saturday, Sept. 26 — 7 p.m.
- Sunday, Sept. 27 — 3 p.m.
- Thursday, Oct. 1 — 7 p.m.
- Saturday, Oct. 3 — 7 p.m.
- Sunday, Oct. 4 — 3 p.m.
What it’s about
Come From Away is a true story. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, United States airspace was shut down, and 38 wide-body jets already over the Atlantic were ordered to land at the nearest available runway. Many of them came down at Gander International Airport in Newfoundland — a Cold War refueling stop in a town of roughly 10,000 people that suddenly had to take in nearly 7,000 stranded strangers.
For five days, Gander and the small communities around it fed the passengers, bedded them down in schools, churches and Legion halls, drove them to the coast, opened pharmacies and phone lines, and looked after their pets in the cargo holds. In Newfoundland, people who are not from there are called “come from aways.” The show is what happened when 7,000 of them arrived at once.
The musical, with book, music and lyrics by the Canadian husband-and-wife team Irene Sankoff and David Hein, is built from interviews the pair conducted with Gander residents and returning passengers. It opened on Broadway in March 2017, earned seven Tony Award nominations and won for Christopher Ashley’s direction, then ran for years in New York, Toronto, London and on tour. It plays without an intermission, roughly 100 minutes straight through, driven by a folk-rock band with fiddle, whistle and bodhrán.
It is also a genuinely difficult piece for a high school company. There are no star turns and no big set: a dozen chairs, a few tables, and a cast that switches character — American pilot, Nigerian passenger, Gander mayor, local reporter, rabbi, mother of a New York firefighter — in the space of a line, often with an accent change to go with it. The Newfoundland dialect alone has undone professional productions. Doing it well takes ensemble discipline more than anything else, which is exactly what Opelika’s program has become known for.
The theatre society staged Footloose: The Musical for six performances last April in the same hall, and its posters carry the group’s own standing promise: #weneverdisappoint. East Alabama Arts now includes Opelika High Theatre Society productions in the ticket package it offers its patron subscribers — an unusual nod from the area’s professional presenting organization to a high school company, and one the students earned. The society’s next production, So Until, is scheduled for Nov. 3 and Nov. 7.
A note for families: the show deals directly with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and with the fear, grief and anti-Muslim suspicion of the days that followed. It is generally recommended for middle school age and up.
The director: a new Hall of Famer
The production is directed by Revel Gholston, who has run the Opelika High Theatre Society and managed the Opelika Center for the Performing Arts for about a quarter century. Four weeks before opening night, on Aug. 22, he was inducted into the Alabama Conference of Theatre Hall of Fame.
It is the latest in a long run of recognition. The Alabama Conference of Theatre named him its Teacher of the Year in 2014 and gave him the Dorothy Schwartz Outstanding Educator Award for Alabama in 2023; Opelika High School named him its Teacher of the Year for 2012-2013. In February 2017, then-Mayor Gary Fuller proclaimed Feb. 7 “Revel Gholston Day” in Opelika, surprising him at a City Council meeting in front of his family and his entire theatre society. By that proclamation’s count he had already directed more than 45 productions and taken OHTS to three straight “Best of Show” wins at the state Trumbauer festival, with the cast of Children of Eden representing Alabama at the Southeastern Theatre Conference for the first time in school history. He also chairs the Trumbauer District 4 festival, which Opelika hosts, and is a past chair of the Alabama Conference of Theatre’s high school division.
Gholston earned a bachelor’s degree in English with minors in theatre and creative writing from the University of Iowa in 2000 and an education degree from Auburn University in 2002. By his own account in his Alabama Conference of Theatre biography, he has handled more than 100 professional touring productions for East Alabama Arts and directed nearly 50 high school productions, while teaching in the classroom part-time. He and his wife, Kate, have two children.
Word of the Hall of Fame induction spread locally through a tribute posted by Cliff McCollum, an Opelika native who was one of Gholston’s earliest students. “The state has finally put in writing what a couple generations of Opelika theatre kids have known for years,” McCollum wrote, describing a teacher who “refused to let them settle for what was easy when he knew they were capable of something better.” His verdict on the honor: “About damn time.”
Poster courtesy of the Opelika High Theatre Society.
