Girl From The North Country NYC Reviews and Tickets

"What makes 'Girl from the North Country'…so special…is the showcase it provides for one magnificent cover after another of Dylan's oeuvre…thanks largely to the extraordinary orchestrations…Because of the show's position between a straight play and a musical, not everyone can avoid overacting...Dylan's lyrics often have little to do with the moments they illustrate…More significant than their specificity is their emotional value…Every song sounds freshly minted."
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"A slow, sad, elliptical and occasionally exquisite theater piece...The odd pairing of McPherson’s scenes of hard luck lives with Dylan’s songs of yearning, delivered by a splendid 17-member cast, work better than you might expect, but not as well as you might have hoped...The playwright...seems more interested in presenting a community than in focusing on individual characters...The saving grace are the songs, aided by Hale’s orchestrations and the performers’ powerhouse singing."
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"The use of a narrator often means that a screenplay is in trouble. That goes double for a play or musical, not that this doctor is much help...McPherson calls his book for this musical a 'play,' which is apt. The songs aren’t so much integrated into the plot as they are dropped...The voices here are superb, and McPherson’s staging is most effective when he’s using his large cast as back-up singers...But often I had to try to forget the story to enjoy the music."
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"The abundance of characters and the necessity to make room for songs limits the ability to develop any character in depth and rushes the exposition...Many of the plot threads seem overly familiar while others are abruptly dropped without resolution. The songs, while beautifully performed, rarely seemed closely linked to particular events or characters. While it was a pleasure to see so many fine actors on stage, I was sorry that they did not have more opportunity to act."
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“If we just assembled to hear the many haunting songs by Dylan as sung by cast members...the experience would be enough of a treat. But McPherson pursued the idea of combining Dylan’s music and lyrics with a story to which they could be emotionally matched...It turns out to be a very creative fit that makes the musical extra fascinating...Here and there fitting a Dylan song into a situation may be slightly strained, but mostly the concept works exceedingly well."
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"Rather diffuse, pale, and soulless...Though visually and aurally appealing, lacks intensity and vitality...Feels more like a schematic play with music (and a weak one at that), than an integrated musical...McPherson does little to give them a compelling voice or story arc. Instead, in the end, the lights fade on the characters, defeated and dead—the beauty of their tragedy lost on me, despite the lovely singing and stagecraft behind the footlights."
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"As beautifully sung, staged, and played as his music is, Bob Dylan can feel a little in the way in 'Girl From the North Country.' The songs don’t add to what we see in front of us; they luxuriantly, resonantly echo what we know rather than deepen McPherson’s troubled characters. This production is beautiful in so many ways, but this critic ultimately wanted less of a musical master and more of the playwright’s vision."
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"There is a kind of intuitive sense, then, in using Dylan's songs for a not-quite-jukebox-musical about the Great Depression...And the result is sincere and moving, a lovely little melodrama. In 'Girl from the North Country,' we hear snatches of Dylan rather than full renditions, creating a greater sense of fluidity between music and speech while also avoiding the pitfall of reverse engineering the narrative from the lyrics."
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