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 was not what I expected. This musical had a lot of good laughs, but also a lot of dreariness. I guess that should be expected for a play set in the depression, but still I expected more hope than what we got. There were several plotlines that didn’t really always intersect, but they did shed light on the complexity of each of the characters. Hopefully reading this will help you stay up to speed on the many characters and their unique storylines while you’re at the show.
The playwright, working with Dylan's blessing but not his participation, created the show as a large ensemble piece that captures several characters at one specific junction in history. When you deduct the length of the songs from the length of a two-act musical, that leaves very little time to explore any character's story in-depth. That has the effect of lightening the narrative load on any given song.
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