Slow Train Coming

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. Hailed as an experience “as close as mortals come to heaven on earth,” by The New York Times, 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.

Opening on Broadway in the middle of an unprecedented moment, Slow Train Coming is a book about pressing on in the face of extreme adversity. 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.

Together they follow the show from its beginnings at New York’s Public Theater where it emerged as an underdog-of-a-show, 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 grit and determination lived by the company of this quirky musical-that-could.