I happened to be in a section of Chicago’s CIBC Theatre Wednesday night where several people apparently did not return after intermission, and I found myself curiously upset.
How could anybody exit mid-experience from “Girl From the North Country,” a show that so gorgeously situates the music of the great Bob Dylan in so rich a place (Duluth, Minnesota) and time (the late 1930s)? How could they not see the depth of commitment from this superb touring cast, acting in a way people just don’t typically act in a Broadway musical? How could they not feel to their bones how the writer-director Conor McPherson, the writer of such Irish dramas as “The Seafarer” and “Shining City,” had used his career-long obsession with fear and sadness and existential angst, and his questioning of what happens when we shuffle off, to take a jukebox musical where the genre has long been afraid to go?
There was deja vu in the experience, too.
On Broadway, “Girl From the North Country” was first felled by the COVID-19 shutdown and then killed off by audiences wanting escapism, not a musical about the flailing residents of a boarding house trapped in a noir-tinged purgatory. This is a dark-hued show strikingly akin to Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” with an added touch of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” If ever there was a piece that I felt deserved to be wrapped in a protective shawl, maybe like the octogenarian Dylan himself, here was that piece.
Then again, it was Valentine’s Day.
I’d watched the first half of the show through the silhouette of the couple in front of me. In Act 1, her head fell on his shoulders, even though there was cold comfort from the stage that their collective self would be enough armor against life’s sadnesses and losses — which is why Robert Allen Zimmerman famously said that, for him, rock ‘n’ roll, with its unserious and often mercenary rebelliousness, was never enough.
The Dylan catalog is rooted in Woody Guthrie-style folk, Robert Johnson-style blues and Hank Williams-like country. To watch this show is to be reminded that other, gentler artists singing Dylan songs have changed how they have been perceived, softening their hard-edged exteriors. Dylan is popularly identified as a 1960s hippie in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, strumming his guitar for pot-smoking college kids who wanted to shake off their suburban parents and who, eventually, either shook Dylan off too or forgot what he was really singing about (life, struggle, death), if they ever fully knew. (You cannot, when you are still young.)
To my mind, jukebox musicals have two meaningful artistic purposes. One is to make the audience feel strong and powerful again by replicating the songs that chartered their youth, a la “Jersey Boys.” The other, yet better one is to recontextualize the work of a great songwriter and make you hear and feel it in striking, fresh ways. That’s what “Girl From the North Country” achieves. Dylan was born in Duluth, not on New York’s Christopher Street. He was just one generation removed from the characters in this show, all fighting for life on the shores of Lake Superior, mangled and squeezed by the residue of the Great Depression and subconsciously afeared of the war ahead, a conflict perfectly timed to torpedo those who had actually gotten their acts together.
It’s not all depressing. Minnesotans know how to love, as Dylan fans well know. I don’t think much is achieved by my recounting what happens to whom in this boarding house, suffice to say that the story is narrated by a physician (played by Alan Ariano), the struggling place is run by one Nick Laine (John Schiappa) who has a particular affection for Elizabeth (Jennifer Blood, who is just fantastic). The other fine principal actors are David Benoit, Ben Biggers, Matt Manuel, Sharaé Moultrie, Jay Russell, Chiara Trentalange, Jill Van Velzer, Jeremy Webb, Aidan Wharton and Carla Woods.
You’ll hear about two dozen Dylan songs, including “All Along the Watchtower,” “Forever Young,” “Slow Train” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” Simon Hale’s arrangements are as arresting, and sometimes as unfamiliar, as the harmonics. But this is a show seeking the roots of the musical artist drawing people in through the door, in all the myriad senses of that word.
Based on what I saw Wednesday night, I think you need to not hate Dylan to appreciate the show, although I don’t believe a previous love affair is a prerequisite. You certainly have to be willing to feel some things not customarily attached to Valentine’s Day (the couple left) or really any other regular evening. But then, a trip to the theater is not supposed to be a quotidian experience.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Girl From the North Country” (4 stars)
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When: Through Feb. 25
Where: CIBC Theatre, 18 W. Monroe St.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $35-$129 at www.broadwayinchicago.com