Review: Girl from the North Country
While Bob Dylan has been committed to his Never-Ending Concert Tour for almost 35 years, the Broadway show featuring his music, Girl from the North Country, faced all kinds of challenges getting untracked. Originally staged in London in 2017, it had a three-month engagement at the Public Theater in the fall of 2018 and set a Broadway opening for March 5, 2020. One week later, the very day I was supposed to see it, Covid-19 struck, and all the theaters shut down. It finally reopened on October 13, 2021, then announced it would close at the end of January for a hiatus, then have a limited run from April to June at the Belasco Theatre. I figured I’d go see it just before Bob’s birthday.
Written and directed by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson, Girl from the North Country is set in a boardinghouse in Duluth, MN, the town where Dylan was born, in 1934 That’s seven years before his birth, so clearly it’s not your typical jukebox musical based on an artist’s life (see Carole King, Tina Turner, and coming soon, Neil Diamond). The characters, though not drawn from any Dylan songs, could be called Dylanesque, a cross-section of outsiders and seekers.
The boardinghouse is presided over by Jay O. Sanders, a rock-solid presence in numerous productions, including Shakespeare at the Public and Richard Nelson’s Apple Family Plays. The multi-talented Mare Winningham, known for her work in film (St. Elmo’s Fire), TV (The Affair), stage (the Patty Griffin musical Ten Million Miles), and music (four solo CDs), plays his mentally unstable, but astute wife. Other characters include Craig Bierko (a brilliant Harold Hill in the 2000 The Music Man), out to make a buck, Luba Mason (The Capeman), his unsympathetic wife, Matt McGrath (Cabaret), a charlatan preacher), and Anthony Edwards (ER) as the town doctor and narrator (in the manner of Our Town or Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone). It was announced before the curtain that Edwards (who is Winningham’s new husband) had just assumed the role three days earlier and would be relying on a script, but he handled himself well.
There are many other strong performers (especially Jeannette Bayardelle) as singers and actors, in the ensemble. Backed by a five-piece string band, some of the songs reflect on the situation: “Sweetheart Like You” (“doing in a dump like this”) or “Like a Rolling Stone” (“how does it feel to be on your own”). “I Want You,” taken at a slow tempo (as Dylan himself did over the years), has a palpable quality. “Idiot Wind,” which I always found grating in the original version from Blood on the Tracks, becomes effectively yearning.
Some, like “Duquesne Whistle,” have less obvious connections on the plot, but serve to lift the production. Using “Hurricane,” Dylan’s epic about Ruben (Hurricane) Carter, makes sense about a character with a boxing background, but is undercut with a superfluous dance number that follows. The penultimate number, “Forever Young” (sung beautifully by Winningham) resonates with the characters’ fear of aging. It’s a bittersweet note to end the show on, so “Pressing On” (from Saved, one of Dylan’s Christian albums), was added to be an upbeat, gospel-style finale.
Some friends had expressed serious reservations about the show. Dylan himself professed to be very moved by it. I felt it was flawed by a script that didn’t totally deliver but mitigated by Dylan’s songwriting genius. His catalog is so rich that you could spin it any number of ways. Girl from the North Country is more an Americana setting than any particular number (and the song itself is never really heard), but it’s evocative. The show closes on June 19, a week after the Tony Awards (it’s nominated for seven, including Best Musical and for Winningham’s Leading Performance in a Musical). Will it win? I’d say it’s a long shot, but rumor says it's been filmed, and that may be the best way to enjoy it.
photo by Matthew Murphy