Publisher's Synopsis
Despite historic, seemingly insurmountable setbacks of five openings, Bob Dylan's musical Girl from the North Country has gone on to become an enormous critical and commercial 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 true future American classic. Slow Train Coming is a book about pressing on in the face of extreme adversity. This behind-the-scenes oral history follows 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 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, the book is both an inside look at a perilous moment 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. Slow Train Coming captures the incredible journey of the musical from potential disaster to smashing success, whilst at the same time documenting a significant period of Broadway history throughout the pandemic shutdown and rebirth of 2020-2022.
