If the notion of a Bob Dylan musical doesn’t pass your particular sniff test, you’re in good company.
Twyla Tharp’s 2006 Dylan dance-musical, The Times They Are a-Changin’, was a critical disaster that limped its way to Broadway, from which it disappeared in less than a month.
“A Bob Dylan musical is a terrible idea,” said Conor McPherson, the celebrated Irish playwright who wrote Girl From the North Country, a musical featuring the songs of Bob Dylan. Er, what?
A fine distinction should be made: Yes, Dylan’s music is central to and used throughout Girl From the North Country. But the musical isn’t about Dylan. Dylan is not a character in the play. And the song selection is anything but a greatest-hits (or jukebox musical) playlist.
Yes, “Like a Rolling Stone” is here. So is “Lay Lady Lay,” “All Along the Watchtower” and “Forever Young.” But so are “Sign on the Window,” “What Can I Do for You?” and “License to Kill,” to name three that might not resonate with the more casual Dylan fan.
The audience’s familiarity with the songs is beside the point, though. Dylan is famous for reworking, sometimes radically, songs from his catalog in concert. And McPherson’s remakes won’t seem blasphemous to any but the most intransigent Dylanphile.
The story is set in Duluth, Minn., the birthplace of Bob Dylan nee Robert Allen Zimmerman. It takes place in 1934, seven years before Dylan’s birth. (Young Bob grew up in Hibbing, 75 miles northwest of Duluth.)
The songs span Dylan’s career, from the title tune, first released in 1963, to “Duquesne Whistle,” from Dylan’s 2012 album, Tempest. All songs in the musical are performed on instruments that would have been available in 1934, so no chiming Fender Telecaster or soulful Hammond B-3 organ on “Like a Rolling Stone.”
(Also, praise to all powers that be, none of the oh-so-’80s production tricks that marred 1985’s “Tight Connection to My Heart.”)
McPherson said Dylan’s record company approached him in hopes of creating a stage work featuring Dylan’s music.
That McPherson was asked should put to rest any notion that Dylan’s label wanted a jukebox. He was known for plays such as The Weir and Port Authority, dramas in which characters reveal their stories through McPherson’s choice and economical writing.
Minus the music, Girl From the North Country slots comfortably in with those works. It takes place during the heart of the Great Depression when unemployment was almost 22 percent. Set in a run-down boarding house in danger of foreclosure, the story touches on alcoholism, race, mental illness, financial fears and catastrophes, and how hope can live and thrive or die on the vine. Also, it’s winter. In Minnesota. Enough said.
McPherson’s use of songs spanning 50 years is bold and not without potential peril. Despite one character being a boxer, “Hurricane,” is set so specifically in another time and place (Summer 1967, New Jersey for starters) that it’s hard to imagine the song as anything but an anachronism.
However, most of Dylan’s songs, and certainly the majority of the ones McPherson chose, have a timeless quality that likely encouraged McPherson to not play safe, but to dig deep, trusting both his instincts as a playwright and Dylan’s as a songwriter.
Besides, if some fans and critics nitpick, McPherson’s work got the thumbs up from the man himself.
“I’ve seen it, and it affected me” Dylan said in The New York Times. “The play had me crying at the end. I can’t even say why. When the curtain came down, I was stunned. I really was. I wanted to see it again.”
Girl From the North Country plays in Morsani Hall March 27-31.