Girl From the North Country: Conor McPherson and Bob Dylan beguile audiences on Broadway

A spring storm is raging on the streets of Manhattan. Tourists scurry for shelter from the rain and a flash of lightning provides superfluous embellishment to the darkening sky above the Times Square illuminations. Up on one of those vast digital billboards is an ad for Girl From the North Country, a musical by Irish playwright Conor McPherson. The play, which combines McPherson’s sublime storytelling and Bob Dylan’s back-catalogue, has had seven Emmy nominations, one Grammy nod and a clutch of rave reviews. The show will soon arrive at the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin. Prepare to be moved and beguiled.

It’s a short walk in the driving rain from Times Square to the Belasco Theatre. Outside people line up under an awning waiting for admission. Broadway has only been back in business since April and the gratitude and joy of visitors is palpable. “It’s just not New York without Broadway, is it?” a young woman remarks to nobody in particular. A theatre employee with a sign that reads “Mask Up” walks along the queue handing out face masks to those who have forgotten that strict Covid measures are still in place.

At the Hudson Theatre next door, Sarah Jessica Parker and her husband Matthew Broderick are performing together in a revival of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, but the Belasco is home to a grittier, far less glamorous offering. Girl From the North Country, a show about resilience, has already been through a lot. It emerged to instant acclaim in 2017 in The Old Vic in London followed by a stint at the West End and New York’s Public Theatre. In March 2020, it was the last show to open on Broadway before the pandemic closed houses all over the world. It opened on a Thursday and shuttered exactly one week later.

Now that “the great bright way” – the newly adapted nickname for Broadway – is buzzing again, audiences have been packing out the Belasco for McPherson’s first musical. The theatre, built in the early 1900s, is a real Broadway beauty on three levels, all polished wood, Tiffany lighting and ornate boxes. In the audience, people settle into their seats, nursing plastic Girl From the North Country branded cups full of chilled water and wine. The man with the “Mask Up” sign makes one final plea to the audience not to forget about the global pandemic before lights dim and a hush descends.

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Another storm is brewing inside the Belasco. Some of the 19-strong ensemble walk through the auditorium and climb up on to the stage. We’re in Duluth, Minnesota, during the Great Depression. The deprivations of winter 1934 have come early to this port city on the shores of Lake Superior, which also just happens to be the birthplace of Bob Dylan.

Our narrator, Dr Walker, played by a husky voiced Robert Joy, introduces us to the players on stage including a handful of musicians on fiddles, mandolin, piano and drums. This, it soon emerges, is deceptively simple, character-driven storytelling about a group of directionless souls trying to make their way in the United States. Desperate to stave off financial foreclosure, Nick Laine, played with dejected charm by Stephen Bogardus, runs a dilapidated boarding house, a temporary home for a motley crew of down-on-their-luck inhabitants. His own family is troubled. A daughter Marianne is pregnant but won’t reveal by whom, and a son Gene (Colton Ryan) is an alcoholic dreaming of becoming a writer. Also blowing through the boarding house are the Burkes, a husband and wife who lost everything in the crash, accompanied by their intellectually disabled grown up son Elias. Pugilist and ex-convict Joe Scott, played by Austin Scott, arrives with a dodgy looking preacher, Reverend Marlowe. And as we soon learn, boarding-house owner Nick has become romantically involved with a boarder, Mrs Nielsen (Jeanette Bayardelle), behind his wife’s back.

Then there is Nick’s wife Elizabeth Laine, played by Mare Winningham, a woman intent on speaking her mind, a mind that’s fading fast. She thrives on coarse language and childlike displays of uncomfortable truths. Winningham shines in every scene, embodying a woman who even while in the grips of dementia is bent on commanding attention. Whether catatonic or caterwauling, hers is a singular, captivating performance and that’s before she even opens her mouth to sing.

Immersive story

And oh, the singing. This ensemble, crowded around old-school microphones or kicking up heels for a hoedown, are as worthy of superlatives as the cast of Hamilton, also singing their guts out at a theatre a few blocks away. Is it the singers or the songs or the story that makes this production so enthralling? It’s all of them all at once. McPherson, described by critic Ben Brantley of The New York Times as “perhaps the finest English-language playwright of his generation”, has pulled off a significant theatrical feat, an immersive story complemented by the careful cherry-picking of 19 tunes from Dylan’s more than a half century of songs.

There are some songs even the most casual Dylan appreciator will recognise — Make You Feel My Love and Like A Rolling Stone for just two. Other songs are more obscure, hidden gems familiar only to ardent Dylan nerds. And yet familiarity with Dylan’s oeuvre is kind of beside the point with this production. The songs are elevated on to another plane entirely by the delivery of these magnificent performers and by the musical arrangement of Simon Hale. You hear the tunes and words as though for the first time. And the lyrics, while rarely reflecting the exact plot of the play, seem to fit perfectly into McPherson’s tale of loss, loneliness, love, hope, survival rotten bad luck and – always – resilience. These, after all, are songs by the only folk singer to win a Nobel Prize for literature, an accolade awarded to Dylan by the Swedish Academy for “having created a new poetic expression within the great American song tradition”.

Even for many who never really got him, Dylan’s genius has been laid bare here. His Nobel Prize-winning lyrics seems to be imbued with even more meaning on this stage when delivered by this diverse, extraordinarily talented cast. There are so many standout moments that it’s impossible to list them all, but here are three: a wistful and arresting Winningham crooning Forever Young; Scott, a former lead on Hamilton, belting out a mash-up of Hurricane and All Along The Watchtower backed by soaring harmonies from the footstamping, handclapping, tambourine-shaking ensemble. And for pure goosebump moments, it’s hard to beat Bayardelle as Mrs Nielsen lamenting her romantic fortunes singing the plaintive Idiot Wind, closing the song with the tiniest of tweaks to Dylan’s lyrics. “I’m an idiot babe, it’s a wonder that I still know how to breathe.”

The story behind the origins of Girl From the North Country goes that Dublin playwright McPherson, the man behind The Weir and This Lime Tree Bower, was approached by Dylan’s people to write a play after the singer had seen and been moved by his work onstage. Dylan has said that being associated with McPherson is “one of the highlights of my professional life. It goes without saying the man is a genius for putting this thing together … my songs couldn’t be in better hands.”

Interviewed by the New York Times a couple of years ago, Dylan shared his feelings about the musical. Had he seen it? “Sure, I’ve seen it. I saw it as an anonymous spectator, not as someone who had anything to do with it. I just let it happen. The play had me crying at the end. I can’t even say why. When the curtain came down, I was stunned. Too bad Broadway shut down, because I wanted to see it again.”

Perhaps the octogenarian was in the audience of the Belasco that stormy May night or maybe he will come, incognito, to Dublin to see it again. Or to Belfast. Or London. The play will have a different cast for the first Irish and UK tour but you’d have to hope it will have the same throbbing heart, affecting melodrama and transporting performances delivered with grace, steel and soul. When it’s all over, with one last rousing ensemble chorus of Pressing Down moving some of us to tears, we all spill outside clutching our Girl From the North Country plastic cups and our battered playbills into a noisy, balmy New York evening. The storm has abated. The storm is coming. It’s called Girl From the North Country. I’d recommend you go and see it.

Girl From The North Country will be at the 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, for five weeks from June 25th and at the Grand Opera House, Belfast, from February 14th to 18th, 2023.