The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is in town for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we’re letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
As I sat down to watch I’m Almost There, Todd Almond’s new musical making its world premiere at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I got a ping on my phone that the show had announced an Off-Broadway transfer (at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater September 26–October 5). Suddenly it had an achievement, an accolade to live up to before Almond had even played the first note.
And then it immediately proved itself wholly ready for the move.
Almond is one of those artists who kind of does it all when it comes to musical theatre. As an actor, he starred on Broadway in Girl From the North Country. As a writer, his musical Iowa (co-written with Jenny Schwartz) played Playwrights Horizons Off-Broadway in 2015. And he’s written musical versions of The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Odyssey for The Public Theater.
In I’m Almost There, Almond revisits that last one a bit, both as a writer and performer, also accompanying himself on the piano. Only now Odysseus is a gay man living in modern-day NYC, and is on a quest to get downstairs where Guy, the charming and handsome gentleman he met at a brunch the day before, is waiting with a nice cup of artisan-grade coffee. On the way down, he will encounter a number of monstrous roadblocks, from a nasty upstairs neighbor, to a man who spends his days covered in the soil of his hometown and a talking (singing!) cat who swears she’s 53 percent the spirit of Almond’s late mother.
Video: In Todd Almond's New Musical I'm Almost There, Modern Dating Becomes an Odyssey
This dreamy absurdism (Almond’s character does suffer from sleepwalking, we learn) injects a nice amount of humor into what is otherwise a story about a paralyzing lack of self-confidence. Almond’s sometimes-years-long interactions with these characters on his trek to the ground floor are over the top, and yet still at least partially recognizable to anyone who has lived in NYC with all its characters. Each has their own quirk, a manifestation of Almond’s character’s own baggage—one wonders if he secretly wants to be delayed by all these whack jobs.
As directed by David Cromer, I’m Almost Here feels vitally unique and novel. It’s not quite pure musical theatre, not quite pure song cycle, not quite pure monologue. It’s not surprising that Audible commissioned the work. The piece feels fresh and altogether new, while somehow also feeling inviting and comfortable, for lack of a better word. The same applies to Almond’s writing style. The songs are fantastic, imminently listenable and never derivative. I found myself pining for an album as soon as the performance was over, almost as if Audible knows exactly what they’re doing here (the piece is already slated for audio release as an Audible Original).
Almond is a terrific performer, with a fantastic and palpably emotional voice both aurally and in terms of his writing, and he’s backed here by Erin Hill on harp and Luke McCrosson on bass, playing stunningly unique orchestrations by Jonathan Mastro. In Cromer’s staging, Hill and McCrosson become the characters in Almond’s journey, a fun conceit that both prove they are more than game for.
But there’s a deep melancholy that lurks underneath the quirky fantasticalness of Almond’s tale. By taking a page from Homer, he gives weight to a story that might otherwise seem inconsequential and minor. As so many of us know, the outwardly inconsequential can feel colossal on the inside. Almond’s hero is almost ready to make himself vulnerable enough to want, to search, to reach for love again. What made I’m Almost There the most moving to me is how it recognizes how truly epic that quest can be, even when it just involves walking downstairs.
I’m Almost There is playing Summerhall’s Main Hall at Edinburgh Festival Fringe through August 26, and then will move to the Minetta Lane Theater in New York City September 26-October 5. Tickets to the Fringe run are available here, and tickets to the Off-Broadway performances are available via Ticketmaster.
Todd Almond's I'm Almost There
Todd Almond's I'm Almost There
Todd Almond's I'm Almost There
Todd Almond's I'm Almost There
Todd Almond's I'm Almost There
Todd Almond's I'm Almost There
Todd Almond's I'm Almost There
Todd Almond's I'm Almost There
Todd Almond's I'm Almost There
Todd Almond's I'm Almost There
