‘Girl From the North Country’: Arden Theatre makes the best case for a middling Bob Dylan musical

When it comes to jukebox musicals, Girl From the North Country is an outlier.

It is neither a revue (like Side by Side by Sondheim), nor a bio-musical (Jersey Boys, Ain’t Too Proud), nor an effort to integrate an artist’s song catalog into a purely fictional story (Mamma Mia!, Jagged Little Pill).

The show, which opened Wednesday night and runs through Oct. 25 at the Arden Theatre Company, pairs a bleak Depression-era tale by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson with an eclectic selection of more than 20 Bob Dylan tunes, from the obscure to the familiar (”Like a Rolling Stone,” “Hurricane,” “Forever Young”).

The music and drama exist adjacent to each other, distinct but part of the same melancholic world in which nearly every character is damaged, broke, jobless, ruthless, desperate, or some combination thereof.

“McPherson kept saying, ‘I’m writing a play, and I’m writing a musical, side by side,’ ” explains Terrence J. Nolen, the Arden’s producing artistic director, who directed the show. Girl From the North Country resembles a Eugene O’Neill play in which “strangers are thrown together and their stories unfold,” he says.

“And next to it are the songs, orchestrated with a sound that would be true to 1934, when the piece is set.”

To Nolen, in fact, Girl From the North Country isn’t a jukebox musical at all. “Not by my definition,” he says, since “a lot of jukebox musicals celebrate a writer’s greatest hits. And sometimes there’s a kind of loose biography of the writer throughout.” Here the only literal connection to Dylan is the setting of Duluth, Minn., his birthplace.

The Arden breaks from the 2020 Broadway production and subsequent national tour by using actor-musicians. The 2018 Arden production of the folk-rock musical Once was one inspiration, Nolen says. Another was his 1998 production of Frank Galati’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, which interspersed dramatic scenes with music.

In Girl From the North Country, the 13-member ensemble plays more than 40 instruments, in addition to singing. Nolen frames the piece as a radio drama, with characters stepping up to old-fashioned microphones to belt out songs.

Songs that, to be clear, mostly have only a marginal connection to either the action or the characters. They are atmospheric, sometimes emotionally resonant, and, at the Arden, terrifically well performed by an outstanding ensemble of mostly local actors.

“I Want You” becomes a duet for two parting sweethearts (played by Giacomo Fizzano and Lyndie Moe), who want other things or people more. “Like a Rolling Stone” is the plaint of Elizabeth Laine (Sarah Gliko), the boarding house owner’s wife, whose dementia has eroded her inhibitions, to sometimes comic effect. “Hurricane” tells the story of one unjustly incarcerated boxer and is sung by another, Joe Scott (Sevon Askew).

Along with its debt to O’Neill, the piece uses a narrator evocative of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Here Dr. Walker (Greg Wood) not only sees the past and future of other characters; he also medicates their present-day pain. But, Girl From the North Country doesn’t pack the emotional punch of Wilder’s classic, and it won’t leave you in tears (unless you were hoping for a short evening — the show runs about two hours, 40 minutes).

The show’s Broadway national tour, which stopped at the Forrest Theatre in 2024, seemed unbearably dreary to me. And I will never be convinced that McPherson’s sketchily drawn and improbable agglomeration of characters, anachronistic dialogue and (mostly tragic) incidents constitutes a good play, with or without Dylan’s music.

A few instances: It’s hard to believe that any father (here boarding house owner Nick Laine), however cash-poor, would try to couple his pregnant 19-year-old daughter with a nearly 70-year-old man. Or that his son, an aspiring writer, however drunk, would insist that a professional boxer punch him — or, for that matter, hurl racially-tinged insults at the boxer, given that the adoptive sister he presumably loves is also Black.

Nevertheless, music director Ryan Touhey and Nolen, known for deft direction of dark, challenging musicals by Stephen Sondheim and his successors, have made the best case possible for Girl From the North Country.

They are aided by the intimacy of the F. Otto Haas Stage (the simple scenic design is by James Kronzer, restrained lighting by Chris Lee), a fine central performance by Eric Hissom as Nick Laine, and the rest of the cast.

Among the show’s pleasures: Gliko tearing into “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Forever Young”; Candace Thomas as the amiable Mrs. Neilson, Nick Laine’s potential escape hatch; the charismatic Matteo Scammell as a Bible-selling reverend, botching attempts at theft and extortion, and Scott Greer, as a problematic father and failed factory owner. As his intellectually stunted son, Harrison Smith electrifies the theater with a thrilling rendition of “Duquesne Whistle.”

On Broadway, Girl From the North Country was a polarizing piece. Critics mostly raved; audiences were divided between lovers and haters. The Arden’s well-wrought production has moved me closer to the middle.

“Girl From the North Country” runs through Oct. 25 at the Arden Theatre Company, 40 N. 2d St. 215-922-1122 or ardentheatre.org