Ordinarily, the actor-writer-musician Todd Almond is a pretty unflappable stage presence. But normal rules do not apply when you discover at intermission that Bob Dylan is in the audience of the performance you’re giving of a musical that’s saturated with his songs — and your harmonica solo is coming up.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever panicked,” Almond writes in his new book, “Slow Train Coming: Bob Dylan’s ‘Girl From the North Country’ and Broadway’s Rebirth.”
An oral history, it chronicles the journey of Conor McPherson’s “Girl From the North Country” from the Public Theater in 2018 to Broadway in 2020, then through the theater’s traumatic pandemic shutdown to a restart in 2021 on a much more fragile Broadway. Rigorously footnoted, informed by interviews with fellow company members as well as industry figures, the book is shaped by Almond’s own memories as a cast member making his Broadway debut.
Its publication dovetails with Audible’s audio release of Almond’s surreal, nearly solo musical “I’m Almost There,” about one man’s fear-filled, distraction-strewn path to love. Inspired by “The Odyssey,” it had a limited run at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan last fall, directed by David Cromer.
Earlier this month, Almond, 48, spoke by phone from his house on an island in Maine. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
How did “Girl From the North Country” change you?
It made me encounter mortality. I think it was simply the experience of living and dying every single day: my character living and dying. Somehow the repetition of that ritual made me realize the worth of the time that I spend with people, or on a project. Plus, Conor puts so much religion into his plays, and so many ghosts.
Was writing the book partly about wanting to hang onto the show?
I’m not sure it was that. I had a very strong impulse to write it and to write it quickly, because I think I could feel myself starting to forget it. And a lot of people that have read the book, not even [people] with our show, just in our business, said: “I forgot that all of that happened. I forgot we went through that.”
One section, called The Stranger in the Hoodie, is about Dylan seeing the production at the Public. Is he what people ask you about the most?
It is absolutely the first thing they ask: “Did Dylan see the show?” I say, “Yes, he did.” Then they say, “Did you meet him?” And I have to say, “No, I didn’t.” [laughs] Which, you know, stings a little.
I don’t like to know who’s in the audience, but I don’t get nervous if I feel confident in the show. But that was pretty nerve wracking, playing the harmonica in front of Bob Dylan.
Every performance, you privately dedicated your big song, “Duquesne Whistle,” to someone. Tell me about that.
Sometimes, whether you want to call them superstitions or what, little rituals and habits begin to form as you’re performing a show over and over. I try to make a performance not about me, as a way to not be nervous. It probably started with my husband, who was in the audience, so I thought, “I’m going to sing this for him.” And then that worked its way into my performer ritual superstition. Probably the night Dylan was there, I sang it for him.
How was it to interview people you know about an experience you had together?
I recommend everybody do this in life. If you’re working with someone for years and you think you know them, take them to a four-hour lunch and talk about your time together. I felt like I was meeting people all over again.
You write that “Girl From the North Country” felt like “the music I used to play downtown; it was melancholy, it was ‘other.’” That seems very much in the neighborhood of “I’m Almost There,” with the dream logic and surreality, but also the humor.
I spent so much time, my early years in New York, hanging out with John Cameron Mitchell [of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” fame] and people who write in that kind of alt-pop world that does have a vein of melancholy and high art. And that’s what the music in “Girl From the North Country” felt like to me. Because Bob Dylan is so intellectual, but also mystical. That feels connected, to me, to the Justin Vivian Bond [of Kiki and Herb fame] approach to music.
Do you consider “I’m Almost There” a musical?
I’ve always had a hard time achieving other people’s goal of what a musical is. I thought, “I’m going to write a musical that I tell,” which is a form I’d fallen into by performing at Joe’s Pub a lot. I would write these strange musicals and think, “I’m going to try it out.” I would gather a band and a couple singers, or sometimes I would just do it, and talk and sing my way through. When I sat down to write “I’m Almost There,” it felt like a medium I had been working in already.
What’s the difference — in substance, feel, experience for the listener — between an audio version of a musical and a cast album?
My goal in writing the piece, because it was commissioned from Audible, was to make something that you have to use your imagination while listening, and that would be an adventure to listen to. You could be as strange as you wanted to be. The stage version is very much like me singing at Joe’s Pub. It is story theater.
When you’re onstage, do you think about who’s out there in the dark?
I wish I could be a person who didn’t. The other time I’ve been just wild with panic and anxiety was doing “I’m Almost There” in Edinburgh because — I knew they were coming, they’re friends, but still. It was Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Martin McDonagh. I saw them entering the theater; they were sitting right there. And I tell you, I have never been so outside of myself doing a performance. That and Bob Dylan were definitely the hardest. Because I knew exactly who was out there.
If you’re filling out a form that asks what you do for a living, what do you write?
Every freaking time, I write “writer,” and then I cringe. Or I write “actor” — actor! — and I throw up. Or I write “musician,” and I think, “You’re not a musician. You would be fired in a minute.” [laughs] Because I think of the players in the pit or, you know, an orchestra. Obviously I’m a musician. I play the piano on the road with singers all the time. But that is such a good question. That really pushes a button for me, because every form I fill out, I do not know the answer.
