A lot of Bob Dylan songs are essentially self-contained novellas in musical form, so you’d think a Broadway show drawing on 20 of Dylan’s tunes would have no trouble constructing a coherent plot around them. And yet …
“Girl from the North Country” is that Broadway show. Written and directed by Conor McPherson, the musical incorporates songs spanning a wide swath of Dylan’s career, from the early ’60s to the 2010s. Yet “Girl from the North Country” is not a show about Dylan, or even, really, about his songs, despite their prominence. Rather, it’s a muddled attempt to weave together a story about what happens when “a group of wanderers’ lives intersect at a house full of music, life and hope,” according to the show’s own precis. Boy, are there some structural problems, though.
Set in in a failing boarding house in Duluth, Minn., in 1934, the show attempts to give equal weight to the white boarding house proprietor, his psychologically unstable wife; his mistress, who is awaiting an inheritance; his alcoholic would-be writer son; his adopted, pregnant teenage daughter, who is Black; a couple with a developmentally disabled adult son who may have accidentally killed a girl; a down-on-his-luck boxer; and a grifter who purports to sell Bibles and may or may not have just escaped from prison with the boxer. With so many characters, and therefore so many stories to try to jam into the proceedings, a lot of the story feels underdeveloped, and the characters make a lot of clumsy attempts to contextualize what the dramatist Lajos Egri called “jumping conflict” — that is, when a character skips from one state of being to another without a logical chain of events, or thoughts, leading from one to the other.
That happens a lot in “Girl from the North Country.” One instance: the son, who is white, encounters a man, a late arrival who is Black, bedding down on a bolster in the living room. For some reason that’s never made clear, the son taunts the man with racially charged language into taking a swing at him. Later, we learn the man who was trying to go to sleep is a boxer. Plenty of other details go unexplained: what happened to unseat the wife’s psyche? Why is there occasionally an “Our Town”-style narrator, and why don’t his interjections help to make things clearer? Who are the random members of the ensemble who step up occasionally to sing lead vocals when the music takes over?
The songs, at least, are generally thoughtfully arranged, though they rarely seem to connect to what the characters are doing or feeling. Sometimes they become duets, or full-cast singalongs (some of the cast members also contribute instrumental parts), and there are medleys and interpolations that work beautifully: Inserting verses from “Hurricane” into “All Along the Watchtower,” for example, or a mash-up of “Sweetheart Like You” and “True Love Tends to Forget” that becomes something moving and new.
The cast also includes some gifted singers: Jeanette Bayardelle (as Mrs. Neilsen, the mistress), in particular, brings a rich, earthy soul sensibility to the numbers she sings, and Jennifer Blood (playing Elizabeth Laine, the wife, at the performance I saw) helped make “Like a Rolling Stone” into the showstopper it was intended to be. Yet the disconnect between the songs and the plot, and the generally baffling storyline, make you wonder: how did McPherson sell Dylan on this?
“Girl from the North Country” has done just fine, of course: It’s up for seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and the reviews (apart from this one) have been glowing. Maybe the use of Bob Dylan’s music simply overshadowed the multitude of dramatic sins committed by the plot. That’s too bad: Dylan’s lyrics could have suggested a million different directions for the plot, and somehow this is where McPherson landed.