What do you get when you cross The Iceman Cometh and Pump Boys and Dinettes? I’m not sure, but I’m guessing it would resemble Girl from the North Country, a downbeat jukebox musical set in a Depression-era boarding house full of lost souls who interrupt their unhappiness long enough to sing snatches of roughly two dozen Bob Dylan songs. For about an hour, this conceit works amazingly well. The characters—ranging from the pitiable boarding house owner and his mentally ill wife, Nick and Elizabeth Laine (Stephen Bogardus and Mare Winningham) to their boozehound son (Colton Ryan), a conman preacher (David Pittu), on-the-lam boxer (Sydney James Harcourt), desperate bachelor (Tom Nelis), and widow (Jeannette Bayardelle) who vainly hopes for a fresh start with Nick—are dark and borderline desperate, but we see them at their worst because life has forced them to their lowest. Author/director Conor McPherson clearly makes some characters more immoral than others, but we sense that nearly all are a product of bad luck more than bad intentions. And then the Dylan songs start, most performed in a slow, country-ballad mode that perfectly sustains the overall mood. This is a musical where audiences don’t clap at the end of numbers; we simply return with the characters to their daily melancholy at the boarding house. By the second act of this two-and-a-half hour show, however, what was engrossing gets soaked in sameness. The occasional rousing tune (“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”) may kick off a party or Thanksgiving dinner, but the songs—as with so many jukebox musicals—often feel shoehorned into the proceedings. Just because Joe is a fighter doesn’t give McPherson license to offer the first two verses of “Hurricane,” which feel jarringly anachronistic for 1930s Duluth, Minnesota: “Patty called the cops, and they arrived on the scene with their red lights flashing in the hot New Jersey night.” After awhile, we start to wonder if the show could take any tune off the radio, slow it to half tempo with acoustic guitars, piano, and fiddles, and make them serve the mood just as well. As a director, McPherson cannot be faulted. The ebb and flow of the actors’ stage movements feels fully lived-in, and the production is beautifully wrought, right down to the occasional use of black and white projections to offer welcome relief from the sepia-toned boarding house kitchen. What’s missing, then, apart from your basic happy ending, is a better connection between song and story, and more of a reason to care about these folks—as opposed to observing them almost clinically. Girl from the North Country is an admirable work, but there’s no getting around it being the feel-grim musical of the season. For that kind of thing, Kander & Ebb still serve better than “Empire Burlesque.”
