Review: Todd Almond Embarks on an Odyssey of Self-Reckoning in I’m Almost There

Todd Almond’s I’m Almost There consists of little more than Almond himself behind a piano and two other performers, with barely any set except for a curtain and a second piano hanging from the ceiling stage right (Se Oh is credited as scenic consultant).

And yet, that turns out to be all one needs to be engaged by this theatrical song cycle, which has now landed at Brooklyn Academy of Music for a longer stay after acclaimed earlier, shorter runs at Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre in 2024.

“You’re never gonna believe this,” Almond says in his opening line, and the magical-realist tenor of much of the ensuing episodic narrative fulfills that line’s promise. The set-up, however, is quite mundane. At an Easter brunch he didn’t really want to attend, Almond meets Guy, with whom he ends up spending the rest of the day. Almond’s attempted kiss at the end of their meet-cute goes awry, leading him to think they will never see each other again. But the next day, Guy is in front of his building, two coffees in hand, having bought one for Almond after he admitted to loving instant coffee the day before.

Will he go down to meet Guy? That’s the central question of I’m Almost There as Almond embarks on an odyssey that doubles as his decision-making process. Along the way, he encounters a gallery of eccentric supporting characters, including an upstairs neighbor who’s lost her cat; a vampire who lives in the basement of his apartment building and watches old movies of himself; the neighbor’s twin sister, who doesn’t want her sibling to know she’s in the same building; and the cat herself, who talks to him and claims the spirit of his dead mother inhabits 53 percent of her. (Two other performers, harpist Erin Hill and bassist Noah Max Amick, play some of these roles.)

As whimsical as that list of supporting characters sounds, genuine thematic and emotional tentpoles ground Almond’s wildest flights of fancy. “Do you ever talk to your neighbors? I don’t,” Almond says at one point, elucidating the kind of keep-to-oneself mentality that tends to proliferate in big cities like New York. Later on, though, Almond performs a number from Guy’s perspective in which he professes loving the work of Joyce Carol Oates because of her willingness to write about a wide variety of characters other than herself.

I’m Almost There as a whole could be seen as a response to that kind of insularity, since even the oddest character is painted with an empathetic eye. Though she realizes her awkwardness turns many people off, the upstairs neighbor’s stated refusal to act as anyone but her authentic self is admirable in a certain light. The vampire isn’t a bloodsucker, but merely someone who has chosen an extreme way of coping with childhood trauma. Even the fact that the neighbor’s twin sister is trying to recruit Almond to a pyramid scheme carries an undercurrent of pathos, especially after Almond signs up and discovers an unexpected refuge from the melancholy that engulfs him.

Principally, though, I’m Almost There is about Almond’s own guarded psyche. The sleepwalking dream he recalls having after that awkward first-kiss attempt—in which he imagines himself on the edge of a building, perhaps desiring to jump off—suggests unprocessed emotional pain, as do mentions of past troubles with parents and significant others. These psychological scars aren’t brought out in the open but left to fester beneath the amiable surface, as they tend to do in real life.

Cumulatively, they add up to a 65-minute epic journey in which each supporting character suggests an allegorical self-reckoning. Almond most directly states this intention at one point when he sings, “I didn’t know today I’d wake up / to confront my deranged self here / like Odysseus in Hades / or like Edna before her mirror [the latter presumably referring to the main character of Kate Chopin’s feminist classic The Awakening].”

The specificity of Almond’s fanciful sensibility is such that I’m Almost There doesn’t escape the feeling of a glorified therapy session, however surreal. Upon reflection, though, one could see something more universal peeking through the solipsism. The show is Almond’s way of reminding us that both pleasure and pain are inevitable parts of life, and that sometimes emotional risks are worth taking for the possible rewards.

It helps that Almond is a solid composer and a charismatic storyteller. David Cromer’s direction mostly stays out of Almond’s way, though the high-contrast chiaroscuro lighting design (by Stacey Derosier) and subtly contrasted costume design (by David Hyman) recall his work on shows like The Sound Inside. Yet with Almond conjuring whole physical and emotional worlds simply through his own voice, piano, and personality, additional directorial adornments are unnecessary for this idiosyncratic yet strangely affecting show.