Todd Almond, Slow Train Coming Bob Dylan’s Girl from the North Country and Broadway's Rebirth, Bloomsbury Academic | Methuen Drama, January 2025.

Thank you, NetGalley, for this uncorrected proof for review.

This is an intensely personal account of the challenges in staging a play on Broadway. The narrative concentrates strongly on Todd Almond’s experiences and responses, while including a massive range of quotations about the other actors’ experiences. For someone interested in the staging of Bob Dylan’s Girl from the North Country, its nuances, meanings and relevance, and achieving eventual success despite the difficulties that beset the actors and the opening because of covid, this makes an engaging read.

There were some lovely anecdotes that would resonate with would be actors striving in this unremittingly difficult environment. For example, Todd Almond’s venture as a guitarist – with little experience, this became a success story; the pitch of the song he had to render, with his trepidation about the high notes; his engagement with seemingly mystical events and their impact on his experiences when the play at last opened on Broadway.

However, a much stronger engagement with the wider world of appearing on Broadway and staging a play, even dealing with the extreme difficulties of the Covid 19 epidemic which surely have some similarities with other events that impact on the opening of a play, would have given this book a broader appeal. Todd Almond provides a very impressive bibliography, which perhaps he might have used to greater effect, an index and photographs. There are detailed and informative descriptions of the latter.

Self-Puffery by a Broadway Actor about a British… Americana Show

“The incredible journey of a musical from potential disaster to success, and the Broadway industry that managed to stay alive during the pandemic shutdown of 2020-22. Despite historic, seemingly insurmountable setbacks of four openings, Bob Dylan and Conor McPherson’s musical Girl from the North Country became a critical Broadway hit…” The title comes from Dylan’s 1963 song. The musical version includes Dylan’s songs, and was written by McPherson. This musical actually saw its premiere back in 2017, and ran off-Broadway and in other theaters up through 2020, when this Broadway staging took place. McPherson is an Irish playwright and screenwriter, who has been active and winning awards since 1999.
“The musical weaves two dozen songs from the legendary catalogue of Bob Dylan into a story of Duluth during the Great Depression, to create a future American classic.” This is an absurd self-puffery: Almond is claiming the play that he is covering will be canonized before he gives any information about it aside for that it includes a canonized musician’s songs… “…A book about pressing on in the face of extreme adversity.” “Extreme”? Covid was pretty bad, but it was not “extreme”. A pop playwright like McPherson could have just sat it out at home, instead of pushing to do this production to expose actors to danger… The reasons for pushing should probably be explained, instead of just making the re-staging of a pre-Covid play sound like a “great” achievement on its own. “Todd Almond’s behind-the-scenes oral history weaves his personal first-hand account of starring in the show with exclusive interviews and reflections from fellow cast members and the creative team.” I was questioning why this book is so self-puffing: this explains it. The lead actor in this show is self-puffing his own performance… “Together they follow the show from its beginnings at New York’s Public Theater where it emerged as an underdog-of-a-show…” Ah… so there is a mention of its pre-Covid run, but this fails to specify that this was back in 2018, and it does not mention the initial successful runs in London in 2017. It was the opposite of an “underdog”: it was the top-dog. “…Through a fraught jump to Broadway against a backdrop of the emerging Covid-19 pandemic and the longest shutdown in Broadway history, which resulted in the theatre industry’s subsequent fight for survival. Told through personal stories, anecdotes from the cast, production shots, behind-the-scenes photos, and insights from the creators, this book is both an inside look at a perilous moment of one of America’s proudest institutions, Broadway, and a true story of American…” eh… it was first-staged in London… “grit and determination lived by the company of this quirky musical-that-could.”
This book does not have a good start in “Prologue: Flowers”. The narrator describes needing “to throw away every living thin in this room”, including the flowers… He is upset that this is the “Happy Opening!” he has to deal with because of Covid… though Covid isn’t mentioned. Then, “1: Heaven” begins in 2018 when the author first encountered this play. It meanders into his one manual labor of installing (unsafely perhaps) windows, and generally what playing guitar is. There are few concrete facts, or quotes, as he is just thinking about random ideas. He went to the show. The following text echoes ideas like: “Broadway doesn’t shut down. It can’t. It is a major artery for the life-blood of the city. But for eighteen months it did shut down… Broadway lay unconscious, near-death.” Melodrama continues from there with few specifics. The back of the book does include color plates with images from different performances mentioned in this book. One interesting image among these is: “Marc Kudisch and Jeannette Bayardelle, in her Covid cab…” She is in a square plastic bubble that is covering her top or head and torso, but leaves a gap below where air can get in. There is also a shot of “Daily pre-show testing”. That must have been a pain. But such details are buried in a lot of hot air in this book. I do not recommend for folks to try reading this book. It’s a lot of puffery, and performance-worship, and a lot of actor-whining, and too few details about much of anything.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024