Girl From the North Country | Conor McPherson & QPAC
QPAC’s production of Girl from the North Country is an emotional, if dissonant, experience that takes Connor McPherson’s depression-era tale of resilience, heartbreak, and self-discovery and combines it with some of Bob Dylan’s classic songs. The result is a jukebox musical that successfully ties its themes to its core songwriter’s artistic aesthetic, but never fully overcomes the need to be a musical in the first place.
The story takes place during the early 1930’s in the peak of the Great Depression in a ramshackle hotel in Minnesota. Here, the gruff hotel manager (played by Peter Kowitz) taking care of his guests while also trying to keep a hold of his own family, including his mentally ill wife (Lisa McCune), alcoholic son (James Smith), and unmarried pregnant adopted daughter (Chemon Theyes). To say there is a lot going on is an understatement, and that’s even before we get introduced to all the hotel guests – each trying to grapple and overcome their own lot in life to varying degrees of success.
This large character roster does lead to some imbalance in their import to the overall narrative. While I felt as though certain characters really got their chance to develop and build an emotional connection with the audience, others felt like they were only added to plot to mark off a square in “depression-era” bingo. There’s the businessman who has gone bankrupt, the travelling priest who nobody wants to listen to, and the love interest who can’t be with the person they want because of circumstance. It’s not that these archetypes aren’t engaging in their own right but placing them on characters that only existed for that purpose feels like a disservice to the message the show is trying to convey about the human spirit.
What compounds this issue is, surprisingly, the Bob Dylan songs. For a singer-songwriter who became an icon for connecting with the plights of the “average person” in their lyrics, every time Girl from the North Country cut from an engaging dialogue exchange to one of his songs, I couldn’t help but feel like it undercut the tone. The songs should be a good fit for a story like this, and the musicians who covered these classic tunes using 30’s instruments did a terrific job, but I couldn’t help but think that time could have been better spent developing the large ensemble of characters.
The performances from the cast were terrific across the board. Kowitz was believable as an overworked hotel manager and family man who lacks the emotional capacity to do either job efficiently, Elijah Williams was equal parts charming and allusive as the convicted boxer, but McCune stood out for her layered portrayal of a woman battling a mental illness who still finds time for joy in her life. Her performance of “Like a Rolling Stone” at the end of Act One brought was spine-tingling, and one of the few occasions where Dylan’s music and the script merged together beautifully.
