Post by rick on Mar 6, 2020 2:57:29 GMT -5
‘Girl From the North Country’ Review: Bob Dylan’s Amazing Grace / This ravishing and singular musical hears America singing — Dylan — during the Great Depression.
Portions from the review --
<snip>
" A nation is broken. Life savings have vanished overnight. Home as a place you thought you would live forever no longer exists. People don’t so much connect as collide, even members of the same family. And it seems like winter is never going to end.
That’s the view from Duluth, Minn., 1934, as conjured in the profoundly beautiful “Girl From the North Country,” a work by the Irish dramatist Conor McPherson built around vintage songs by Bob Dylan. "
<snip>
" consider what’s also visible on the stage from the beginning: a radio, a piano, a bass, a set of drums and old-timey microphones on stands. These are the instruments of redemption.
Again and again, one of the hapless souls onstage will step up to the mike and lead a Dylan classic in a voice that suggests not thought, but deepest feeling made audible. It could be an achingly wistful “I Want You” (sung to perfection by Ryan and Caitlin Houlahan) or an improbably reborn “Like a Rolling Stone,” with a tambourine-rattling Winningham flailing like a sheet in the wind.
Throughout you become newly aware of themes of rootlessness, isolation, disenfranchisement and — beyond that — an upward-reaching spiritualty in the music of Dylan, and you remember he was indeed a child of the Depression. (This show makes a good case for his much-debated Nobel Prize for literature.) Exquisitely arranged by Simon Hale and performed by onstage musicians (who sometimes include cast members, with Mason’s jaded Mrs. Burke a knockout on drums), the music has both a plaintive country twang and big-band shimmer.
Without ever acknowledging the transition, and later never holding for applause, characters morph into both piquant soloists and members of a celestial backup chorus. The lighting transforms them into phantasmal silhouettes, like blurred figures from an old photograph album. And when they dance (Lucy Hind is the movement director), it’s with a paradoxical mix of rough individualism and smooth synchronicity. "