Girl From The North Country
Closed 2h 30m
Girl From The North Country
79

Girl From The North Country NYC Reviews and Tickets

79%
(289 Ratings)
Positive
79%
Mixed
15%
Negative
6%
Members say
Great singing, Absorbing, Great acting, Great staging, Disappointing

Following a run at London’s Old Vic and a West End transfer, the new show from Olivier winner and Tony Award nominee Conor McPherson and music icon Bob Dylan makes its American premiere.

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Show-Score Member Reviews (289)

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284 Reviews | 85 Followers
100
Exquisite, Great acting, Great singing, Great staging, Great writing

See it if You want to see a perfectly told story through the poetic brilliance of Bob Dylan’s music. The cast is phenomenal! This musical is gorgeous.

Don't see it if You don’t want to feel every type of emotion towards the story told by the cast. You feel part of their lives in this intimate staging.

114 Reviews | 25 Followers
100
Great singing, Great writing, Must see

See it if You want to see terrific actors, terrific voices, really great arrangements of Dylan’s songs. Who knew Mare Winningham could sing like that?

Don't see it if You don’t like dramatic musicals with Depression-era themes.

68 Reviews | 6 Followers
98
Great acting, Great singing, Quirky, Must see

See it if See it if you like or never liked the music of Bob Dylan’s music. What is done with his music and the story written around it is great.

Don't see it if I can’t think of a reason not to see it. At the Public before it heads for Broadway

536 Reviews | 279 Followers
98
One of the most exquisite evenings of theatre i have experienced in a long time, Absorbing, Great acting, Great singing, Great staging

See it if you love Bob Dylan's music. Or if you want to see how McPherson uses the music artfully to comment on the characters' moods and thoughts.

Don't see it if you don't like bleak stories. Read more

77 Reviews | 20 Followers
97
Ambitious, Absorbing, Clever, Enchanting, Entertaining

See it if Amazing music and moving story. A very powerful moment about racism. I got the last seat. Loved it.

Don't see it if If you don’t like historical musicals or the music of Bob Dylan.

419 Reviews | 52 Followers
97
Absorbing, Great acting, Great singing, Great staging, Must see

See it if Fabulous set piece of Dylan storytelling. What a cast! Mare! Has the feeling of an Altman film...delicious.

Don't see it if No reason. This NOT a jukebox musical.

112 Reviews | 51 Followers
95
Absorbing, Great acting, Great singing, Great staging, Great writing

See it if Short-stories in depression era flophouse enhanced by beautifully sung Dylan songs will redeem your faith in musicals. Original & affecting.

Don't see it if Discouraged folks in a quiet hamlet shouldn't sing & dance. It moves tunefully through a modern Calvary where redemption isn't always joyous

197 Reviews | 73 Followers
95
Absorbing, Enchanting, Great staging, Thought-provoking, Must see

See it if you are interested in human stories told with grace by amazing actors. It's a phenomenal night at the theater.

Don't see it if you are looking for a Bob Dylan jukebox musical. It's really it's own story. I forgot these were famous songs, they fit the plot so well. Read more

Critic Reviews (37)

The New York Times
October 1st, 2018

"A rich and strange marriage of the talents...If you’re a hard-core Dylan fan, you’ve heard these songs before. But, for me at least, they’ve never sounded quite so heartbreakingly personal and universal at the same time...The most imaginative and inspired use to date of a popular composer’s songbook in this blighted era of the jukebox musical...A uniformly excellent American cast that wears its roles like confining and prickly skins."
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Time Out New York
October 1st, 2018

"The show makes Dylan’s songs as unfamiliar as it can; it freezes them in timelessness...'Girl from the North Country' doesn’t have much plot, but it provides a compelling setting for Dylan’s plangent lyrics, whose range encompasses yearning, bitter confusion and grace. McPherson uses Dylan’s songs as atmosphere in the broadest sense: They are the air the characters breathe. And when the musical’s cool gains force, it acquires a piercing chill."
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New York Magazine / Vulture
October 1st, 2018

"The play is a somber, self-serious affair. In searching for the soul in Dylan’s tunes, McPherson, who also directs the show, and his orchestrator and arranger Simon Hale have consistently sapped them of their mischievous spark...'Girl From the North Country' never quite stops feeling like a dirge, and though its large cast is full of marvelous singers, their individual characters are less real people than they are a hodgepodge of archetypal Americana."
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New Yorker
October 14th, 2018

"McPherson attempts to surround several of Dylan’s tunes with a frame vague enough to contain their poetry and broad enough to relate their social truths...A show that fully accepted the challenge of Dylan’s elusive balance between unstable consciousness and tough social fact might have told more of its story through the lives of these two women...A different setting in time might have helped as well...McPherson offers up plenty of people...but never a voice, or a mind, like Dylan’s."
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Deadline
October 1st, 2018

"Conor McPherson’s radiant musical is as eccentric and unclassifiable as any fellow traveler of Dylan should be. A remarkable piece of theater, 'Girl' opens tonight at the Public Theater with an impeccable cast...One of the best ensemble performances in recent memory...The Dylan songs – culled from his entire career to date and sung by the uniformly excellent cast – don’t so much unfold the narrative as convey mood and characters’ interiors"
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Variety
October 1st, 2018

"Some of Dylan’s songs are a poor fit for this highly specific setting...But that doesn’t invalidate McPherson’s insight that Dylan’s narrative lyrics express a sense of existential detachment, of longing for connection that reflect the uncertainties of 1930s America...Better to sit back and just enjoy the music — and credit McPherson with giving each song the gift of clarity. If not always apropos to their dramatic moments, the lyrics are clearly intelligible."
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The Hollywood Reporter
October 1st, 2018

"Rather than artificially shoehorning songs into a purpose-built narrative, McPherson artfully builds a novelistic tapestry of archetypal figures, the poor and disenfranchised of an America suspended in time, using Dylan's pungently expressive lyrics...These people and their grim situations are carved out of a familiar Americana mold, and yet under McPherson's probing direction, the actors transcend melodramatic cliché, endowing their characters with battered humanity."
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The Observer
October 1st, 2018

"For me, the heartbreak is that Conor McPherson, an artist dear to my heart, has written and staged such a disappointing play...More problematic than the loose, decorative deployment of the songs is the play itself. McPherson seems to have ransacked every cliché he could find about American society and culture between the wars, and shoehorned them into a narrative that meanders without momentum."
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