REVIEW: “Girl from the North Country”

For a time, Duluth, Minnesota was the only port city in America with access to both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 

An essential rail crossroad of the north at the dawn of the twentieth century, home to booming lumber and mining industries, Duluth became a major destination for large waves of immigrants from Europe, among them the grandparents of Robert Allen Zimmerman, who in his college years would take to calling himself Bob Dylan.

Winter in Duluth is unrelenting, snowy, and frigid.  It is one of the coldest places in America.  And like so many industrial cities peppered across the varied topography of the continent, Duluth was especially vulnerable to the boom and bust cycles of the national economy in the twentieth century. 

It is this place—amid the Great Depression, in a guesthouse for travelers in the cold of November and December 1934—that makes the setting for “Girl from the North Country”, a new tone poem of a musical inspired by the songs of Duluth-native Bob Dylan that opened tonight at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre following a 2017 debut at The Old Vic in London and a sold-out run at the Public Theater in 2018. 

The cast of “Girl from the North Country”. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Depression-era Duluth provides a precise time and place, a bleak and rootless milieu, for Irish playwright and director Conor McPherson to explore the complex economic and racial dynamics of people—and a nation—falling with no net to catch them in a pre-welfare state of national economic emergency. 

That milieu is rich, conjured with piercing and often haunting specificity by set and costume designer Rae Smith, aided by Mark Henderson’s lighting, and a superb ensemble cast who evoke the despair of the moment and the tenacity it required for survival.  The wind howls.  A storm brews.  The mood is clear.

This musical, however, is not much of one. 

Instead, it operates as a schematic play, with anachronistic, re-imagined renditions of Mr. Dylan’s songs (orchestrated and arranged by Simon Hale)—mostly from the 1970s and 1980s—as interruptions to the action that, at best, offer meditations on a feeling or situation, and, at worst, serve to muddle the overall dramatic effect of the story as characters step forward to sing directly to the audience, clutching an old microphone on a stand. 

Todd Almond and company. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

I say “interruptions” because were the songs cut entirely from “Girl from the North Country”, I suspect the entire show would work just fine, albeit sans a marquee box office draw.  That’s because the composition of music and lyrics for musical theatre is a specific craft, the absence of which is glaringly obvious in any jukebox endeavor like this that takes the pre-existing songs of an artist and interpolates them into a play to serve a dramatic function.

Mr. Dylan’s songs provide no sense of character and never advance the plot because they were not written to achieve either goal.  And yet, they are not used diegetically—in the reality of the story as experienced by the characters—and so they are meant to be reflections of the interiority of the characters singing them.  

Their failure to do this—again, because they are not written to do this—keeps “Girl from the North Country” from being a successfully integrated musical, harkening back to an earlier time when songs in musicals had little to do with the scenes between them. 

The play, however, still offers a compelling look at a mélange of ordinary, forgotten people on the margins of low-rent society, captured through flashbacks of collage-like, episodic vignettes over some six pivotal weeks in their lives, briskly narrated from beyond the grave by the local doctor, Dr. Walker (Robert Joy), in full on “Our Town” mode. 

Dr. Walker (Robert Joy) and company. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

The Duluth guesthouse is run by Nick Laine (Jay O. Sanders) who is deep in despair and debt, facing eminent foreclosure and seeking a solution.  His wife, Elizabeth (Mare Winningham), suffers from early-onset dementia, while their alcoholic would-be-writer son, Gene (Colton Ryan), can’t land a job, and their adopted African-American daughter, Marianne (Kimber Elaine Sprawl), is mysteriously pregnant.  

Their guests include an impoverished widow waiting for probate of her husband’s will (Jeannette Bayardelle) who, in the meantime, is fooling around with Nick; a seedy Bible salesman (Matt McGrath); a former prize-winning pugilist and escaped convict (Austin Scott); a failed businessman (Marc Kudisch), his wife (Luba Mason), and their mentally disabled son (Todd Almond), who murdered someone, forcing them on the lam under an assumed identity.

While Nick tries to get his family’s affairs in order—including arranging a marriage for Marianne to an elderly neighbor, Mr. Perry (Tom Nelis)—the clock ticks as the Depression runs its course.  There is little hope to be found in “Girl from the North Country”—appropriately reflecting the time it is meant to dramatize. 

The Laine Family: Colton Ryan, Kimber Elaine Sprawl, Mare Winningham, and Jay O. Sanders. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

When I saw the show Off-Broadway, it ended with the lights gently fading on the Laine family at dinner, following a sad epilogue from Dr. Walker.  As no surprise to me, an additional closing song, “Pressing On”, has been added for Broadway, no doubt to offer a note of defiance and uplift amid the misery of the story and its enveloping mood. 

There is much that appeals to me in this show.  It looks and sounds terrific, capturing the spirit of a specific moment in time, but to what end?  The entire enterprise gives the impression of being too self-consciously tooled to prize atmosphere over substance, and the use of Mr. Dylan’s songbook feels like more of a marketing move than a truthful artistic choice. 

Yes, Duluth is one of the coldest places in America; on my second viewing, “Girl from the North Country” once again left me feeling both chilly and detached.

Bottom Line: Deeper cuts from the Bob Dylan songbook are roughly interpolated into “Girl from the North Country”, a new musical by Irish playwright and director Conor McPherson.  Heavy on mood, this original Depression-era story offers a compelling look at a mélange of ordinary, forgotten people on the margins of low-rent society, but the effort is hampered by Mr. Dylan’s anachronistic songs and their poor integration into the plot.  This one left me chilly and detached.

______________
“Girl from the North Country”
Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th Street
New York, NY  10036

Running Time: 2 hours and 30 minutes (one intermission)
Opening Night: March 5, 2020
Discount Tickets