Written and directed by celebrated playwright Conor McPherson and featuring Tony Award-winning orchestrations by Simon Hale, GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY reimagines 20 legendary songs of Bob Dylan as they’ve never been heard before, including "Forever Young," "All Along The Watchtower," "Hurricane," "Slow Train Coming," and "Like A Rolling Stone."
It’s 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota. We meet a group of wayward travelers whose lives intersect in a guesthouse filled with music, life and hope. Experience this "profoundly beautiful" production (The New York Times) brought to vivid life by an extraordinary company of actors and musicians.
“Girl from the North Country” will please Dylan fans who are comfortable (and even eager) to hear his music performed in unexpected new arrangements and, again, the show is often fun to watch. But those seeking a coherent and engaging story will have as much luck as a bunch of down-and-out sad sacks in the Great Depression .
Written and directed by Conor McPherson, Girl From The North Country is a musical that still feels like a play with music. It's a show aimed more directly at the head than the heart, and jammed with tropes, references and outright character homages to notable works of American Gothic literature. (This, I suspect, is where much of the audience likely got lost: it's often hard to enjoy a genre pastiche when you're neither deeply aware of the genre, or aware that you're seeing a pastiche.) When the show rockets into music mode, often with actors onstage picking up instruments or turning into "radio singers" around a microphone, none of the vagaries of plot and characterization matter much anymore. Like Spring Awakening, this is an impressionistic musical, rather than a representational one: what is being sung matters more as a mood piece and as a soundtrack cut than as actually related to character or situation. Mamma Mia, this is not.
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