Review: Riveting performance saves Broadway in Cincinnati's Bob Dylan musical

“Girl From the North Country,” a musical built around the songs of Bob Dylan, opened Tuesday, Oct. 17, at the Aronoff Center as part of the Broadway in Cincinnati series.

(As luck would have it, Bob Dylan will be in town to play a sold-out show on Friday, Oct. 20, at Andrew J. Brady Music Center as part of his Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour.)

Now, if you thought a Bob Dylan musical sounded curious, that’s understandable. After all, Dylan has built his 60-plus-year career around songs that are more poetic than glitzy. He wrote a memoir, too, won Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, championed numerous social causes. But a musical? It seems too lighthearted an undertaking for the soft-spoken guy raised in Hibbing, Minnesota.

Mind you, there was a Broadway show filled with his music back in 2006. It was a dance musical directed and choreographed by Twyla Tharp and called “The Times They are a-Changin'.” It didn’t even last a month.

But Irish director/playwright Conor McPherson thought there was still Broadway potential in Dylan’s music. “Girl From the North Country” is the result. It’s a curious sort of musical. Certainly not your run-of-the-mill, song-and-dance tale.

First, you have to understand that “Girl From the North Country” is not a story about Dylan. Yes, it takes place in Duluth, Minnesota, where Dylan was born. But it is set in a guesthouse in 1934 – seven years before Dylan’s birth.

Essentially, McPherson created a tale about difficult lives intersecting in this frigid northern outpost and sprinkled 22 Dylan songs throughout the script. There is no attempt to sing them in a Dylan-like manner. Indeed, as often as not, the lyrics have little to do with the onstage action.

“Girl From the North Country” is often slow-moving and ungainly, a production where the show is less than the sum of its parts. But its saving grace is that there are a handful of memorable performances – Carla Woods as Mrs. Neilsen, the cultured and practical mistress of the guesthouse owner; Sharaé Moultrie as Marianne, the owner’s daughter; and Chiara Trentalange, who steps into several roles including Kate, the heartbroken ex of the owner’s son.

At the center of it all, though, is one remarkable performance – Jennifer Blood as Elizabeth Laine, the owner’s wife. There is a suggestion that the character is struggling with dementia. Or madness. Or perhaps she is simply occupying a different plane from the rest of us.

Wiry and intense, Elizabeth seems completely unhinged at times. At one moment, she’s doubled over on the floor doing ... who knows what. The next, she’s threatening an unscrupulous Bible salesman with a pistol, or burying her nose in someone’s armpit, or prancing about the floor because – well, just because.

Oh, and she sings, too, most notably “Forever Young.” You simply can’t take your eyes off her. Much of what she does is inexplicable. But it’s riveting, nonetheless.

And at its best, that is an apt description for the entire production – inexplicable but riveting.

Again, don’t expect A Dylanesque experience. Take “Idiot Wind,” one of Dylan’s angriest and most savage songs. When Moultrie sings it, it becomes more of a ballad, soft and soothing.

It is just one more curious element in a hodgepodge of a show. There are many aspects that draw attention to themselves, but do little to enhance what we think the performers are trying to accomplish on the stage – Mark Henderson’s lighting design, for instance, and Lucy Hind’s “movement” direction. And, for that matter McPherson’s script, which leaves us with many unsolved mysteries.

But it’s probably best not to analyze too deeply. It is, after all, a jukebox musical, a vehicle to get Dylan’s music on the theatrical stage. “Girl From the North Country” has grander aspirations than most jukebox musicals. But in the end, it might be better to think of it as an enormous puzzle where we haven’t been given all the pieces. The bits we do have paint an intriguing picture. But we wish we had the rest.

“Girl From the North Country” continues through Oct. 29 at the Aronoff Center.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Riveting performance saves Broadway in Cincinnati's Bob Dylan musical