A deep dive into Dylan
‘Girl From the North Country’ explores artist’s catalog, lyrics, poetry
Bob Dylan is an all-time great, a given when looking at the annals of the greatest songwriters in history. With hits like “Hurricane,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan’s decadeslong career includes multiple Grammy wins and the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature. He’s essentially baked into the DNA of America. But how deep does that universal knowledge really go?
“I was shocked to find out just how prolific he is and how deep his writing is, how poetic,” Northbrook native John Schiappa said. “I didn’t realize what a storyteller he was.”
Schiappa arrives in Chicago alongside the touring cast of “Girl From the North Country,” the musical from director and playwright Conor McPherson that features 20 Dylan songs, re-imagined with Tony-winning orchestrations from Simon Hale. Set in 1934 in Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, the show combines McPherson’s script, Hale’s orchestrations and arrangements, and Lucy Hind’s movement and choreography with Dylan’s iconic songs to tell the story of a group of travelers whose lives intersect at a music-filled guesthouse. Through the eyes of those involved, the show offers Dylan fans and novices alike the chance to take a deep dive into the artist’s catalog and explore his lyrics and poetry.
The show’s journey started back in 2017, running at The Old Vic in London before transferring to the West End. It arrived on Broadway in March 2020, following a successful run at The Public Theater in New York, but was then forced to close and reopen a couple of times over the next few years due to the pandemic.
As he looks back, Hale said it was a treat to dig into Dylan’s songbook while working on the show, as he was charged with morphing Dylan’s tunes into stage-ready songs. He said McPherson would bring in Dylan deep cuts, nudging Hale to find a place for them and working out exactly where they’d go on the rehearsal floor. It was a creative process focused on parsing what felt right moment by moment.
Dylan, who is credited with music and lyrics for the show, wasn’t actually directly involved in its creation, though he did give his blessing. Hale joked that Dylan was always on the call sheet for rehearsals, but he never turned up. It’s easy to imagine the kind of pressure the creative team
might have felt had Dylan been in the room. But Hale and Hind both said they found Dylan nothing but supportive and encouraging.
“It was a real voyage of discovery for me, digging into his catalog and also digging into him,” Hale said. “In a funny kind of way, it felt to me as if, once I got there with the responsibility and privilege of working on such an incredible catalog, I thought, ‘OK, forget all that stuff. Get outside of your own head and just follow your nose.’ ”
It’s a notion that was only fed by Hale’s research that found Dylan saying, essentially, that even he sometimes didn’t feel like the recordings of his songs were necessarily the definitive versions of those songs.
“I thought that was really interesting because of course records become iconic and everyone talks about them as if they are the Holy Grail,” Hale said, “but he was actually saying, ‘Yeah, but you know that that was just the recording we did at one particular point.’ So for him to say, ‘Actually that wasn’t necessarily the most representative version of that song’ — I thought that was quite liberating.”
As Hale worked to merge Dylan’s music with musical theatre, Hind worked to pair the music with movement. It’s a show that is fundamentally about human connection and the emotional journey of the individual characters, so Hind looked to explore how characters move together.
“It’s not a traditional musical,” Hind said. “It’s got this very intangible relationship to the music, which makes it feel like it floats above the story.”
She added that the cast helped find the right feel in moments. She gave the example of how, in rehearsals, they’d feel out individual songs when determining whether or not actors should hold microphones. She too referred back to the feeling of sitting in each moment and finding out what felt right.
That effort extends to
the creative team molding the show to each unique cast rather than having performers try to achieve a carbon copy of what may have been onstage in New York or London.
“We embrace the fact that each company is different,” Hale said. “They sound different, they look different, they act differently. Their dynamic is specific to that bunch of humans, so we’ve always embraced that.”
For Hind, that includes moments in the show that are improvised, where she taught performers a few dance styles and then let them each choose when and how they’ll dance. As actor Sharaé Moultrie
reflected on the rehearsal process for the tour, she recalled times when she’d have questions, only to realize the answers were completely up to her own interpretation.
“It gave all of us as actors much more freedom to create,” said Moultrie, who returns to Chicago having performed at Kidzapalooza in 2017 as part of the band Lard Dog & the Band of Shy. “It was just fun to be able to play as much as we wanted. You bring yourself to it and you make the decision versus, ‘Here’s exactly what we want this to look like and what we want it to sound like.’ ”
Fellow actor Schiappa, who was with the show
during its New York runs and who is performing in Chicago for the first time after growing up seeing shows downtown with his dad, also credited McPherson’s direction for allowing them as performers to bring their life experiences to the material. Watching individual stories, whether to see the differences between nightly performances or to simply enjoy peeling back the layers of McPherson’s script and Dylan’s lyrics, the freedom within the show makes it endlessly rewatchable for those involved.
In the end, “Girl From The North Country” aims to present a story of hope and human connection.
And perhaps offer both Dylan superfans and newbies alike a chance to see his lyrics, his poetry in a new and deeper light.
“What I would love for the audience to take away from this is, no matter what challenges you may be facing,” Moultrie said, “there’s always a little beacon of hope that you can hold onto that will hopefully get you through whatever that challenge is.”