Todd Almond

Slow Train Coming: Bob Dylan's Girl from the North Country and Broadway's Rebirth (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks UK
• Seitenzahl: 280
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. Januar 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781350407398
• Artikelnr.: 72247554

Autorenporträt

Todd Almond is an acclaimed performer, songwriter, and playwright. His recent performance on Broadway in Girl from the North Country was called "stunning" by The Washington Post and "roof-raising, uplifting, and
invigorating" by Hollywood Reporter. His musical The Odyssey, for which he wrote the book, music and lyrics, was hailed as "brash, funny and heart-stirring" by The New York Times. His theater piece Kansas City Choir Boy was called "awesome, slyly punk rock" by Rolling Stone. His
original musical I'm Almost There played at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and New York's Minetta Lane Theater in 2024.

Inhaltsangabe

List of Illustrations
Prologue

Part 1
Heaven
Lafayette
Downtown

Part 2
42nd Street
44th Street
Hospital
The Real World
The New World

Epilogue
Afterword
Works Cited
Permissions
Index

Rezensionen

Todd Almond's fascinatingly detailed examination of the recent Broadway staging of the musical Girl from the North Country could not be published at a better time. Although Conor McPherson's play was not about Dylan himself, its use of his songs was crucial to its success, and Almond's book, which uses extensive interviews to explore what it was like to stage a show in New York amid Covid, has a similarly quixotic, rebellious spirit at its heart. The Observer