Girl from the North Country does Dylan right

I spent last weekend in New York City attending a short conference for the American Theatre Critics Association. Of course, the meetings also gave me a chance to visit Broadway and beyond. I'll have a string of posts this week about shows from the trip.

The first note I’ll make about Girl from the North Country, Conor McPherson’s bold new show that uses Bob Dylan’s songs in a jukebox musical like no other you’ve ever seen, is that the show got one vitally important detail right:

No matter the level of drama, angst or turmoil, no one is allowed to enter or leave the scene without being offered a cup of coffee.

It’s a small detail, but to anyone from the upper Midwest who has endured the “Minnesota goodbye,” it’s absolutely real.

That innate understanding rides throughout the musical, which sets up in a Duluth boarding house in the early 1930s.  The country has been ravaged by the Great Depression, and as the season turns from fall to winter, the desperation just gets greater.

Several storylines converge in the rooming house, and they find not so much illustration from Dylan’s songs, but personal, emotional and spiritual depth. While the songs are drawn from across 50 years of Dylan’s music, they are centered during the 1970s, an era when the songwriter focused so much on the soul.

Some of the most affecting tunes are drawn from Dylan’s “born again” albums from the later part of the decade, with “Slow Train” (from Slow Train Coming) a particular standout. Even the songs drawn from later albums offer up the same sense of the sacred and the spiritual.

And familiar songs get a fresh reading here. No one is attempting to replicate Dylan’s distinct singing style. That means “I Want You” can turn into a duet between a young drifting drunkard stuck in Duluth, and his once-girlfriend, who is off to the East Coast with her husband. The lyric’s intense longing becomes so much clearer when it is shared between two voices instead of one.

Of course, you need performers to pull all of this off. As you can hear in the above clips, the company is stellar from beginning to end. As you can hear above, Colton Ryan's drunken rascal and Caitlin Houlahan as the woman whose own dreams are being crushed by the reality of Depression living are able to coming together for four minutes of absolutely beautiful music.

And the version you see isn't the full staging. At the beginning of the song, Ryan's first few attempts are almost stuttered out, as if the character's own hurt means he can barely speak. Yet eventually, he is able to sing.

Girl from the North Country is a show of standout moments: “Hurricane” (sung by a young boxer who claims to have been wrongfully imprisoned) merged with a verse from “All Along the Watchtower”; the surreal tale of “Jokerman” taking on new dimensions in the dark, wet chill of a Lake Superior early winter’s night.

Really, what McPherson and the company have done is create a place for the characters that Dylan made real in his music to find a new home on stage. There is a story that all of these characters tell, but it is clear that this is just one stop on an endless journey like the two protagonists in “Tangled up in Blue” or any one of the hundreds of Dylan songs. Even after the final bows are taken, the stories keep going on.

Girl from the North Country runs at the Public Theater through Dec. 23.