The mysterious man behind the musical ‘Girl From the North Country’? Bob Dylan himself.
When the query came in from Bob Dylan’s office, the writer and director Conor McPherson had no idea what to make of it. Dylan was looking for someone to adapt his music for the theater, but that’s all McPherson knew.
Had Dylan approached other writers? Did he expect a jukebox musical? Was he familiar with McPherson’s work for stage and screen?
Seven years after “Girl From the North Country” had its London debut, four years since McPherson’s large-cast musical made its Broadway premiere, and now, ahead of the touring production’s arrival in Boston, McPherson still has few answers. The show, presented by Broadway in Boston, runs March 12-24 at the Emerson Colonial Theatre.
The mystery about how the show came together has an obvious parallel in the ways the 82-year-old Dylan has managed, through six decades of worldwide fame and intrigue, to remain inscrutable, McPherson thinks.
“It’s kind of scary to me,” he said on a recent Zoom call from his home in Dublin. “It came out of nowhere, and Dylan also came out of nowhere. So this show itself is carrying on from the lightning, from whatever struck him. There’s something strange about it.
“He’s an icon for a reason. And in our show I feel there’s some kind of spiritual energy coming from him and touching us all as humans, as creatures, whatever the hell we are.”
Named for a song originally released on Dylan’s second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” (1963), “Girl From the North Country” employs more than two dozen songs spanning the singer’s catalog to tell the story of a Minnesota boarding house in the 1930s, and the struggling Depressionera characters who are thrown together there.
From the moment McPherson heard from Dylan’s office, he had no inclination to try to tell Dylan’s life story onstage.
“I don’t know how anyone could,” he said. “First of all, I don’t think it’s very clear who the hell he is. The odyssey he’s been on, there’s been 20 Bob Dylans.”
Instead, it struck him to go back in time to the place of Dylan’s own birth, Duluth.
“Usually I get one idea, if I’m lucky,” said McPherson, whose 1997 drama “The Weir” has been named one of the 100 most significant plays of the 20th century.
“It’s a pretty universal story. It’s about ordinary people with ordinary struggles. And there’s something about Bob’s stuff that gets inside that.”
After Dylan approved the idea, his office sent McPherson the songwriter’s complete catalog, more than 50 CDs. He loaded them all onto an iPod, which he set on shuffle and listened to during long walks.
Until that point, McPherson considered himself a casual Dylan fan. “I probably had about six of his albums. But not, like, from the ’80s.”
McPherson credits the arranger Simon Hale with retrofitting the Dylan songs he chose, from the ubiquitous (“Like a Rolling Stone”) to the often overlooked (“What Can I Do for You?”). Hale won a Tony Award for his work on the show.
When a few cast members from the Broadway production of “Girl From the North Country” visited with Dylan after he saw the show, they brought back news that he was moved by hearing his songs in a new context.
“Whaddya know?” he told actress Mare Winningham, speaking of “True Love Tends to Forget,” from his 1978 album “Street-Legal.” “Turns out that’s a good song.”
The cast members of “Girl From the North Country” take turns singing lead. Some pull double duty in the band. When David Benoit learned he’d been cast as Mr. Burke, a down-on-hisluck businessman staying in the hotel with his wife and their developmentally challenged son, he had to begin taking drum lessons immediately.
Benoit, a Fall River native and Boston Conservatory alum who has performed in “Phantom of the Opera,” “Les Miserables,” and many other productions, lost some sleep over the assignment.
“I have to say it was a great source of anxiety,” he said in a phone call. “I was waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. with my feet tapping.”
McPherson wrote the part of Mr. Burke as a Southerner, but when he learned of Benoit’s background, he asked him to play the character as a New Englander.
“So I adopted the dialogue that I’d spent years and thousands of dollars trying to get rid of,” Benoit said with a laugh.
A theater kid who taught himself all the parts from classic musicals ranging from “Jesus Christ Superstar” to “Dreamgirls,” Benoit calls himself “chameleon-like,” vocally. There’s a straightforward, traditional Americana feel to the cast’s interpretations of Dylan’s music, he said, with a healthy dose of spirituality.
“Conor wanted simplicity, and he wanted the style to be as earnest and honest as possible,” Benoit recalled. “There are some moments in our show, like ‘Duquesne Whistle’ or ‘Pressing On,’ that have a huge gospel feel, I think.”
Ultimately, it’s the ambiguity of Dylan’s lyrics that lent them so seamlessly to the story, McPherson said.
“I realized that so many of his songs are incredibly suggestive, and not exactly specific. I found you could use them kind of in any circumstance. Somehow it’s about the feeling, the atmosphere. It carries a kind of subconscious meaning.
“That’s how Dylan’s music works, really, I guess.”
There’s no use trying to explain it, he concluded: “The only thing you can say is ‘Poetry.’ That’s what’s happening.”