Girl From The North Country is bleak but also transcendent

The story of a group of disparate characters trying to survive in North America featuring many of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s greatest hits unfolded at the Bristol Hippodrome, and it sort of swept me away. 

While it wouldn’t be fair to call this a musical, it also wouldn’t be fair to call it a play with songs either. It’s something in between.

It’s also perhaps, one of the least fun shows I’ve come across but might be one of the most tightly polished, emotionally effective, and thought-provoking productions I’ve seen.

Justina Kehinde's Marianne is superb in Girl From The North Country (Image: Johan Persson)

We meet a down-on-their-luck family, the Laines, who run a guesthouse in 1934, Duluth Minnesota, and an assortment of various lost souls that have found their way there just as the bank’s threatens to foreclose it. 

The Laines are a tragic quartet, patriarch Nick (Colin Connor) is trying to hold everything together but failing, his wife Elizabeth (Frances McNamee) told him she didn’t love him anymore but ended up stuck with him after falling ill with dementia, their son Gene (Gregor Milne) a drunkard with aspirations of being a writer and Marianne (Justina Kehinde) an adopted daughter abandoned by her real parents as a baby and now pregnant with a baby of her own.

A star turn from Frances McNamee as Elizabeth whose performance of 'Rolling Stone' is a standout one in a show full of great songs (Image: Johan Persson)

They’re joined by an assortment of other equally tragic figures and what follows is a series of misunderstandings, tragedies and disasters each one hurtling into the next. The story practically dares you to keep hoping that the fortunes will change for at least one of these bleak, miserly and forlorn characters but as each scene passes and another heart breaks that hope fades a little more.

This is made even starker by the fact that the story promises salvation in many corners, perhaps the widow’s inheritance will save the guesthouse, and perhaps the wealthy couple will recover from their hard times, but by the time the final bows have taken place the journey you’ve been on feels quite hollow with only a small hint at a positive future offered.

While the performances from all are anything but dismal, everything about the staging and the set leans into this oppressive atmosphere as well, the dimly lit guesthouse is brought to life by a selection of shabby furniture, a smattering of lights, and translucent screens serving as walls that often hide shadowy figures behind them.

But Girl From The North Country manages to push all of the anger, grief, upset and pain of its characters into something quite magical, making the whole production feel ethereal, other-worldly, transcendent and almost tantamount to a religious experience.

And that’s because of the songs! Oh, the songs are just something else. Bob Dylan has always been renowned as a storyteller, but the musical arrangements here using his songs create something deeply stirring, utterly transfixing and delicately beautiful.

All of the angst, longing, suffering and love that is laced into every word of Dylan’s lyrics are perfectly captured and cathartically released by the ensemble cast of incredible musical performers. Dylan’s songs aren’t just used, as is sometimes the case in Jukebox Musicals, they’re transformed.

A truly incredible ensemble effort from the Girl From The North Country cast (Image: Johan Persson)

And so too was I. Yes, that’s bordering on hyperbole, but since watching the show I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and I haven’t been able to get the songs out of my head.

As someone who has seen a lot of musicals I can sometimes be a bit jaded, but in Girl From The North Country, as bleak as its story is, I found something unexpected, something unique and something new, a renewed love of musical theatre and how different and incredible it can be.

Girl From The North Country is at the Bristol Hippodrome until February 4. Tickets are available here: https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/girl-from-the-north-country/bristol-hippodrome/