This hit play offers a fresh perspective on Bob Dylan’s genius
The very idea of a Bob Dylan jukebox musical might seem inherently absurd, with implications of sprinkling popular music’s gnarliest, wordiest, most contrarian poetic genius with some showbiz razzamatazz. Perhaps squeeze Dylan into a tuxedo and top hat to tap dance through all 10 verses of Desolation Row in a hilarious romantic farce based on Blood on the Tracks. Anyone for It’s Alright Mamma Mia, I’m Only
Bleeding? The challenge would be to get at least halfway through the epic Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands before intermission.
Irish playwright and director Conor Mcpherson’s ingenious drama Girl From the North Country has already been lavishly praised by critics. The original production premiered at the Old Vic in 2017 before transferring to the Noël Coward Theatre the following year. Now, it has returned to London’s West End with a new cast. It is more jug band than jukebox musical, with three musicians playing old-timey gospel and blues on double bass, guitars and violin in corners of the boarding-house set, while actors occasionally join in on drums and piano. A cast of 19 weave through dovetailing narratives and character sketches from Depression-era
America in a sinuous choreography of movement, dialogue and music.
Snatches of songs don’t so much advance plot as offer tonal reflections of interior lives, glimpses of the mysterious oceans of feelings moving beneath every human surface. No matter how unsympathetic the character, there is a Dylan song to evoke the invisible desires, despairs, fears and hopes pulsing through their bloodstream.
The action is set in Duluth, Minnesota, the iron ore town where Dylan grew up, though he himself would not be born until 1941, seven years after the drama unfolds. It is an inspired choice, a time and place that has infused Dylan’s work, the north country of the title song.
We may think of Dylan as an avatar of the rock generation, but he was steeped in the mysteries of blues and folk, while later albums revealed his debt to the melodiousness and songcraft of early 20th-century jazz and show tunes. With him singing in a voice rooted in something ancient and unlovely even as a young man, it was always this old, ugly America that
Dylan’s musical imagination inhabited.
Mcpherson has drawn on just 20 songs, from a choice of more than 500 in Dylan’s catalogue. And they are not Dylan’s most famous, offering no opportunities for a cheery greatest hits singalong. Yet for a hardcore Dylan fan, even obscure choices can create anomalies. When Rachel John as Mrs Neilsen opens proceedings with a yearning version of Went to See the Gypsy, you might query how Dylan’s account of meeting Elvis Presley in Las Vegas relates to smalltown life in the Thirties Midwest. Or, indeed, wonder what could tempt the good ladies of Duluth to launch into Jokerman’s darkly poetic exploration of the ambiguities of Jesus Christ during a Thanksgiving party.
Yet it is a testament to the protean power of Dylan’s genius that the music resonates so strongly in contexts for which it was never intended. Girl From the North Country is a kind of musical palimpsest, a prism through which to view a familiar body of work from an unusual but enchanting perspective. For Dylan fans, it is a treat. For the less dedicated, there is the possible advantage of hearing Dylan’s magical songs without having to listen to his gnarly old voice struggling to sing them himself.
We think of Dylan as an avatar of the rock generation, but he was steeped in blues and folk