Bob Dylan is hot right now. His musical biography, “A Complete Unknown,” is still playing in theaters as I write this review. The film also racked up an impressive eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan. So, it’s a propitious time for the release of Todd Almond’s new book, “Slow Train Coming,” which tells the story of the creation of “Girl from the North Country,” a Broadway musical that included many Dylan songs. Ironically, “Girl from the North Country” did not have propitious timing when it premiered on Broadway in March 2020, one week before the COVID shutdown. Almond, who had a supporting role in the Broadway cast, has a lot of wonderful material to work with here, and the book is often fascinating. However, the author sometimes interjects too many pointless flights of fancy, diluting the story’s impact.

“Slow Train Coming” tells three stories in one book. The first recounts the creative journey of “Girl from the North Country” from concept to Broadway production. The second tells the story of how COVID-19 affected Broadway in general and the cast and crew of “Girl” in particular. Finally, the third tells the story of actor Todd Almond from childhood to his appearance in “Girl.” The first two stories are far more interesting than the third.

“Girl from the North Country” began when Bob Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, approached producer Tristan Baker about using some of Dylan’s enormous catalog in a musical. Ten years earlier, another Dylan musical, Twyla Tharp’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” was a critical and commercial flop. Rosen thought it might be time for another attempt. Eventually, the parties agreed on an unusual format for “Girl.” Noted Irish playwright Conor McPherson wrote a script about the residents of a boarding house in Duluth, MN (Dylan’s birthplace) in 1934, during the heart of the Great Depression. The action would stop at various times in the play, and the characters would begin singing and dancing. The lead singer would stand in front of an old-time upright microphone, while other cast members played instruments from that era for accompaniment. A few songs were popular Dylan tunes, including the title song (which has nothing to do with the play’s story), “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Forever Young.” However, most of the show’s tunes were relatively unknown to non-Dylan followers. Many came from Dylan’s gospel albums. Even the popular Dylan songs had new orchestrations, so casual listeners wouldn’t realize they were listening to Dylan music for a while.

The show opened in London in 2017, where actresses Shirley Henderson and Sheila Atim won Olivier Awards (the British equivalent of the Tony). “Girl” then opened off-Broadway in 2018 to large audiences and critical acclaim. Unfortunately, because of the mechanics of Broadway theatrical productions (one show can’t open until another closes), it didn’t open on Broadway until March 2020. And closed one week later. It reopened in the fall of 2021, but audiences didn’t return. The show closed a second time in January 2022. (It reopened briefly later that spring for a limited run and has enjoyed considerable success on a national tour.)

Todd Almond conducted extensive interviews with his fellow cast members and the people behind the scenes involved in the American production. His personal involvement with the show didn’t begin until auditions for the off-Broadway production. However, Almond also conducted similar interviews with the London cast and crew. “Slow Train Coming” largely takes the form of interview excerpts, formatted to resemble a play script:

MARE WINNINGHAM: (a paragraph of Winningham’s interview).

In between the interview excerpts, Almond tells his story in the first person. At times, the transitions from the recorded interview to Almond’s first-person recollections and back aren’t clear.

Much of the material in “Slow Train Coming” is fascinating, especially for those somewhat unfamiliar with the workings of “the theater.” (I learned the exact difference between Broadway and off-Broadway). Almond and his interviewees describe how the table reads work and the schedule for the various rehearsals. While many of the details in “Slow Train Coming” universally apply to large-scale theatrical productions, some are peculiar to “Girl from the North Country.” One highlight was the night Bob Dylan attended a performance of the off-Broadway show, sitting in the back of the theater, trying to remain incognito. (Ironically, Dylan had a concert in New York the next night, and some of the cast members got the chance to go backstage at that performance.)
As “Girl from the North Country” went through a month of rehearsals and previews before its Broadway debut, COVID was also making its debut in the United States. The author recounts the cast’s reaction to the worsening epidemic, and the precautions taken to keep the cast healthy. (One kissing moment in the play was changed, so the couple merely hugged each other.) When some cast members fell ill, ensemble members stepped into their roles; others roughed it out. And when the author had 18 months to himself during the shutdown, he described how he kept active as he waited out a hoped-for reopening.

Author Todd Almond is a playwright and songwriter, besides being an actor. At various times in the book, he describes his own life and career. Frankly, most of this is fluff and filler. (He installed building windows to make ends meet between rare acting jobs in his youth.) I wish he started the personal material with his involvement with “Girl” instead. Almond also does a lot of rambling philosophizing that interrupts the flow of the text several times. I’d much rather read about the other cast members’ experiences than the author’s views on life, such as the time he proclaims “The entire journey of ‘Girl from the North Country’ with its extreme ups and downs feels fated to me. Conor [McPherson] offering up his idea for the show through a note passed “backstage” (emphasis in original) is the blessed/cursed moment that set the whole thing in motion.” A little of that goes a long way, and, unfortunately, Almond gives us a lot more than a little.

I had other problems with “Slow Train Running” as well. Almond provides snippets about the plot and various songs scattered throughout the book. However, when I finished the book, I still didn’t know the play’s overall storyline well. I had to consult Wikipedia for that. A one-page synopsis towards the front of the book would have been very helpful. Similarly, the author assumes readers are familiar with the various actors whose names he drops. Some names like Mare Winningham and Shirley Henderson are reasonably well known. However, others are not, outside the Broadway theater community. Brief bios of the interviewees would have helped.

The book’s organization is also haphazard, jumping back and forth in time with no real reason. The first chapter segues from a discussion of Almond’s window installation days to his playing the guitar in London, to his role in the show (his character has two lines of dialogue and one show-stopping song) to his conducting research for the book to a reading in 2018 before finally settling in on the history of the production. This rambling introduction nearly lost me before the book really got started.

The only way for readers of “Slow Train Coming” to get a real feel for “Girl from the North Country” is to see a production. Barring that, I strongly recommend watching the various clips that are available on YouTube. Almond couldn’t include such clips or inserts in a printed book. However, he had access to many photographs of the cast and crew, including production stills. For some reason, the book only contains 12 pictures, only one of which is a photo of a scene in the production. This is an unfortunate oversight.

Despite the book’s flaws, I’m giving a mild recommendation to “Slow Train Coming.” I’m much more enthusiastic about “Girl from the North Country,” which I’d never heard of before reading this book but I’ve now added to my future must-see list. The book provides some great insight into the creation of a most unusual project and an education into the ways of the theater. Unfortunately, it also suffers from poor organization and too many distracting observations by the author that were boring and unnecessary. Bob Dylan and “Girl from the North Country” do pretty well without those distractions.

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through NetGalley. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.

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