PROVIDENCE, R.I. — By the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan was the leading singer/songwriter of the American folk music revival. The response to his second album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” and his featured acoustic performances at the Newport Folk Festival led to the media labeling him the “voice of his generation.”
But on the evening of July 25, 1965, the musician took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival carrying an electric Fender Stratocaster guitar. “Over the loudest music ever to hit Newport,” noted music historian Elijah Wald, “he snarled his opening lyric: ‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more!’”
The Boston Globe called this the “night that split the sixties” and reported that Dylan was roundly booed off the stage after only three songs.
If diehard Rhody folk fans haven’t yet forgiven Dylan for his sins, perhaps they’ll forget about them for the two hours and 30 minutes of “Girl From the North Country.” This deeply moving musical is named for a song originally released on Dylan’s second album and offers a score comprised of over 20 reimagined tunes from his legendary catalog. The musical made its Tony Award-winning Broadway debut in 2020. It is now receiving a Rhode Island premiere production at Wilbury Theatre. And there’s not an electric guitar in sight.
In 2014, playwright Conor McPherson — whose earlier works (“St. Nicholas,” “The Weir,” “Shining City”) tended to take place in isolated spaces populated with everyday people who pause to share long, lyrical monologues — was commissioned by Dylan’s management team to create a musical that gave his songs a through line. What they received in “Girl From the North Country” was a musical where Dylan’s long, lyrical songs don’t so much advance a plot as establish an underlying sense of loneliness and longing, and collectively tell a tale of grief and grace.
The show features the wayward residents of a seedy boarding house in Duluth, Minn., (beautifully rendered with dark furnishings by scenic designer Monica Shinn, melancholic lighting design by Andy Russ, and period costuming by Niki Healy) at the height of the Great Depression in 1934. It creatively — through slow-moving, stone-cold serious, heartbreaking storytelling — explores the ways in which their sad lives intersect, diverge, and change through their chance meetings, one song at a time.
Local physician Dr. Walker (Matt Fraza) serves as the fourth wall-breaking narrator, and does so with the same all-knowing awareness and down-to-earth temperament as the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”
He introduces us to the Laines, a fully fleshed but worn-down family who run the boarding house and are straight out of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” There’s Nick (Jim O’Brien), the long-suffering husband of Elizabeth (Anne Scurria), who is impaired by aphasia. They are the parents of Gene (Carlin Fournier), an unpublished writer on the verge of losing his girlfriend Kate Draper (Carrie Tully), and the adopted Marianne (Kimstelle Merisma), who is pregnant and unmarried. She is also Black while the other Laines are not.
The boarding house is refuge to a range of broken and alienated guests, including the widow Mrs. Neilsen (Jessica Gates), the Burkes (Tanya Martin, Ricky Waugh, and Jon Mael) — a tragic family on the run — and the Reverend Marlowe (Philip Iredale), a Bible salesman who shows up at the door with questionable intentions. Also arriving is Joe Scott (Rodney Witherspoon), a wronged boxer who has faced the perils of racism and brings with him a welcome sense of hope and possibility.
These transients and a local businessman who stops by (Scott Levine as Mr. Perry) generate the same collective weight and sense of pathos as the failed, falling, and forgotten folks in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” Powerful stuff.
As they did with the musical “Once” in 2024, Wilbury director Josh Short and music director Milly Massey have staged a remarkably unassuming, achingly beautiful production. And once again, some actors double as onstage musicians (Tully on piano and Martin on drums), which organically integrates the songs into the storytelling. Other musicians, who are wonderful, include David Carney, Jeffery Horton, Hannah B. Devine, David Rabinow, and Riley Ratcliff.
Some of Dylan’s songs don’t quite work within this play’s framework, despite Simon Hale’s well intended orchestrations. But the goodness of fit of Iredale and Witherspoon’s “Slow Train,” Martin’s “Duquesne Whistle,” and Scurria’s “Like a Rolling Stone” is so strong that they feel as if they were specifically written in direct response to the Great Depression.
Missing from this visually impressive production and incredible soundtrack is the onstage talent to actually pull it off. On opening night, too many acting choices lacked authenticity. And while Dylan certainly doesn’t set a high bar in terms of tone, timbre, and pitch control when singing his own songs, McPherson’s play does and the abundance of untrained and off-key performances in this Wilbury staging was unfortunate and disappointing. The execution of Ali Kenner Brodsky’s period choreography was also hit and miss. In short, this challenging musical does not feel properly lived in.
The biggest takeaway from “Girl From the North Country” is a greater sense of the brilliance of Dylan’s wordsmithing and how everything he wrote sounds better when accompanied acoustically. Which is just what the folks in Newport asserted not that long ago.
GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY
Book by Conor McPherson. Music and Lyrics by Bob Dylan. Directed by Josh Short. At Wilbury Theatre Group, WaterFire Arts Center, 475 Valley St., Providence. Through June 21. Tickets are $10-$55, plus fees. 401-400-7100, thewilburygroup.org.
Bob Abelman is an award-winning theater critic who formerly wrote for the Austin Chronicle. Connect with him on Facebook.