When I first heard about “Girl from the North Country” several years ago, I was excited. The idea of having smart, savvy Irish playwright Conor McPherson (“The Weir,” “The Seafarer,” “Shining City, etc.) create a musical using songs by Bob Dylan seemed inspired. Both are great storytellers, and they were bound to bring out the best in each other.
Directed by McPherson and featuring almost 20 Dylan songs, the show premiered at the Old Vic in London in 2017, then transferred to the West End. In the U.S., it had a successful run at the Public Theater in New York City before moving to Broadway in March 2020. It closed and reopened a few times because of the pandemic and now is on a North American tour with a brief stop in Chicago.
Unfortunately, my presumptions about “Girl from the North Country” were wrong. While McPherson’s script is set in Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, in the winter of 1934, the story and the songs have little or nothing to do with each other.
The musical numbers, reworked with Tony Award-winning orchestrations by Simon Hale, include “Went to See the Gypsy,” “I Want You,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Hurricane,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Idiot Wind,” “Duquesne Whistle,” “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power),” “Forever Young,” and many more spread throughout more than two-and-a-half hours. Sometimes they have a tangential relationship to the character(s) singing them; at other times, they come across as assigned at random. Often, only a few verses are performed.
As a Dylan fan, I missed the roughness of his performance style, even though I love covers of his songs by artists like Joan Baez. Despite the folksy edge and period instruments, many of the arrangements were molded into a musical theater mode, so they start to sound much like each other and like the anthems and ballads in so many other shows. The compensation is that most of the ensemble members have marvelous voices, so the solos, group numbers and chorales all sound great.
The real problem is McPherson’s overstuffed script. Although a boarding house provides a logical setting for a gathering of travelers, there simply are too many of them, and they all have stories, so keeping track is difficult, and caring about more than one or two is almost impossible. This is doubly true because the characters aren’t fully developed, so all we get are vignettes. Most of them are dark, and some are clichéd.
The loosely structured story is intermittently narrated, a la “Our Town,” by Dr. Walker (Alan Ariano), physician to the Laine family, and takes place in Nick Laine’s (John Schiappa) rundown guest house. It’s the height of the Great Depression, and the bank is about to foreclose, so he’s desperate to keep his family from homelessness. They include his mentally ill wife Elizabeth (Jennifer Blood), who needs constant care and is given to uninhibited outbursts; would-be writer son Gene (Ben Biggers), an alcoholic; and adopted daughter Marianne (Sharae Moultrie), who is Black and pregnant, but won’t reveal the baby’s father.
Nick’s solution for 19-year-old Marianne is to marry her off to 70ish Mr. Perry (Jay Russell), who has a shoe repair shop. He’s also pushing Gene to get a job, while the boy is broken up over his girlfriend Kate Draper (Chiara Trentalange), who informs him she’s marrying someone with better prospects.
On top of all this, Nick is having an affair with Mrs. Neilsen (Carla Woods), a widow waiting for a $10,000 inheritance to come through and dreaming of a better future with Nick.
Also staying at the guest house are the Burkes: Mr. Burke (David Benoit), a blowhard who lost his business in the stock market crash; Mrs. Burke (Jill Van Velzer), his stylish blond wife trying to make the best of things, and their adult son Elias (Aidan Wharton), who has a learning disability.
Two late-night arrivals seeking shelter during a storm ratchet up the tension: Reverend Marlowe (Jeremy Webb), a self-styled Bible salesman and con man up to no good, and Joe Scott (Matt Manuel), a down-on-his-luck boxer who was in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
Adding to the potential confusion are other ensemble members who show up as needed for various scenes and songs. McPherson’s direction comes across as loose, as does that of movement director Lucy Hind. At times, the actors seem almost to be improvising; for example, when they are dancing during a Thanksgiving scene.
The staging is fairly straightforward with the musicians flanking the playing area and scrims for scenic projections and to suggest windows and doors, as well as to facilitate the lighting and sound designs, especially for storms.
As I reflect on “Girl from the North Country” as a whole, I think that less would have been more.
See it before it closes
Set in 2013 during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, though it could be happening today, Sylvia Khoury’s gripping “Selling Kabul” at Northlight Theatre puts a human face on the consequences for those who trusted us and became collateral damage. The 90-minute one-act unfolds in real time, and although it starts out with rather repetitive conversations under Hamid Dehghani’s direction, the tension mounts steadily until the stakes are life and death as the dangers outside the small Kabul apartment (set design by Joseph Johnson) and risks within are revealed.
At the center is Taroon (Owais Ahmed), who acted as an interpreter for the U.S. military and now is being hunted by the Taliban. He’s been hiding out for the last four months in the apartment of his sister Afiya (Alla Ayilam Peck) and her husband Jawid (Ahmad Kamal), a shopkeeper who survives by making uniforms for the Taliban and hates himself for it. Nosy neighbor Leyla (Shadee Vossoughi) keeps popping in wondering where Taroon is and why her friendship with Afiya has cooled, and Afiya has become exhausted trying to keep her brother’s whereabouts a secret.
The birth of Taroon’s son at the beginning of the play brings the crisis to a head. He’s desperate to get to his wife and baby at the hospital, and his impulsive behavior is making things worse for everyone, especially Afiya who is just as desperate to keep her brother safe. Add the reported cruelty of the Taliban, and the situation becomes explosive. How Khoury handles it — and even manages to inject a note of hope — is one of the reasons not to miss “Selling Kabul.” So is the fine acting.
Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, through Feb. 25, $49-$89, 847-673-6300, northlight.org