Review: GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY Sings Sweet Through the Sour at Benedum Center
7 / 10
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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