Girl From The North Country NYC Reviews and Tickets
About the Show
Production Covid-19 Safety ProtocolsMember Reviews (285)
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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)
"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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"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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"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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"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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"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 challenge of collaborating with this monumental body of work trips up the much-acclaimed McPherson. His words — blustery, profane, biting — never find a way to mesh with the evocative, easy poetry of the troubadour himself...The cast and on-stage band put over the songs well in their new arrangements. But even as you’re tapping your toes, you may well be shaking your head: Why this upbeat rendition of 'The Hurricane' just after tragedy hits?"
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"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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"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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