GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY's Jennifer Blood On 'A Show Like No Other You've Ever Seen'

Calling Girl From The North Country a "jukebox musical" is not only a misnomer, but it completely misses the point of Irish playwright/director Conor McPherson’s acclaimed Broadway musical that features a score by Bob Dylan, according to actress Jennifer Blood, who plays Elizabeth Laine in the national touring company that begins its weeklong stand at Nashville’s Tennessee Performing Arts Center tonight.

“It is a show like no other show you’ve ever seen,” Blood asserts during a telephone conversation while the company was in the midst of performances in Buffalo, New York. While the sounds of her children playing the background punctuated our conversation – “they’re visiting me this week and we’re trying to figure out how to keep them busy and entertained in this weather” – Blood talked about her time with the show since joining the Broadway company.

“I joined the company on Broadway in 2020 as a swing,” she recalls. “I read the script and I was perplexed by what I read and wondered if this was the right show for me. I learned quickly that this was not a jukebox musical, but rather characters singing songs by Bob Dylan.”

After talking with a friend who assured her that she was indeed “right for the show,” she auditioned and was cast: “On my first day, we did a read-through and a sing-through and I realized immediately how this show beautifully incorporates the music of Bob Dylan – it was as if everyone started jamming onstage to this wonderful music.”

“It’s nothing like anything you’ve every seen,” Blood suggests. “You’ll be so moved by what you experience, but you may not see it coming. It’s beautiful and interesting.”

She describes the creative process as “so much fun,” explaining that she was given so much freedom to play a character, about whom no simple description seems to fit. “Elizabeth Laine has been described as being in the initial stages of early onset dementia.”

As a result, playing the character is “incredibly freeing” and what, at first, may not make sense somehow gains more clarity as the plot unfolds.

On Broadway, Tony Award nominee Mare Winningham played Elizabeth Laine, Blood explains, “and so I was trying to play the character and to make the same choices as Mare did, but when we went out on tour, I was encouraged to interpret the role in my own way.”

Blood credits McPherson, who directs his own script, with creating the innovative style in which music and story are woven together, somehow giving new meaning to Dylan’s beloved music (in a recent Rolling Stone survey of the 100 top artists, Dylan is ranked second, just behind The Beatles) for aficionados of his work and allowing new fans a chance to find their own ways of appreciating his music. Furthermore, the action in Girl From The North County is presented in non-linear fashion, which lends itself to unique interpretations and by moving from city-to-city, theater-to-theater each week affords the actors an opportunity to keep the show fresh and new along the way.

The musical is set in 1934, in Duluth, Minnesota, where audiences are introduced to a group of wayward travelers whose lives intersect in a guesthouse filled with music, life and hope.

Written and directed by Irish playwright Conor McPherson and featuring Tony Award-winning orchestrations by Simon Hale, Girl From The North Country reimagines 20 legendary songs of Dylan as they’ve never been heard before, including “Forever Young,” “All Along The Watchtower,” “Hurricane,” “Slow Train Coming” and “Like A Rolling Stone.”

Dylan – and his song “Girl From the North Country” – has a rich musical connection to Nashville. After the near-death experience in 1967 in a motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock, New York, Dylan returned to the recording studio in Nashville later that year, which led to the creation of John Wesley Harding, a collection of short songs inspired by the American West and The Bible. A year later, at the behest of Johnny Cash who told him wanted to produce a new album for him, Dylan returned to Nashville, the result of which was Nashville Skyline, which includes a duet with Cash on “Girl From the North Country.”

Girl From The North Country plays Tennessee Performing Arts Center’s Andrew Jackson Hall January 30 through February 4. For ticket information, go to www.TPAC.org or call the box office at (615) 782-4040.

- photos by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade