Girl from the North Country review

There’s a stellar cast making magic with the immortal music of Bob Dylan – this production of Girl from the North Country simply shines.

Girl from the North Country

Her Majesty’s Theatre

26 March (season to 10 April)

It’s a moot point whether the world needs many (or any) more jukebox musicals, but if they’re all as appealing as the Australian production of Girl from the North Country, the scales tilt in their favour.

The story is about time and place. The time is the Depression of the 1930s, and the place is a down-at-heel boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota, deep in the American mid-west.

Nick Laine runs the joint almost single-handed, for his wife, Elizabeth, is broken by mental illness, and his son Gene is drunken dreamer.

His only help is Marianne, an abandoned African American girl they adopted as a child.

As to their lodgers, well, everyone has secrets, and everyone turns a blind eye.

Cast of Girl From The North Country. Picture: Pierre Toussaint

If the story, and its characters, are cookie-cutter, the performances are not.

A stellar cast, and the immortal music of Bob Dylan, make this production shine.

Lisa McCune is simply amazing as Elizabeth, brittle and brilliant, and in especially fine voice. Peter Kowitz is superb as the tired, angry Nick, presiding over the shapeshifting household with weary bonhomie.

James Smith is the very model of insolent youth, doing little to endear himself to anyone.

The patient, kind Marianne is given an especially nuanced performance by Chemon Theys.

Lisa McCune in Girl From The North Country. Picture: Daniel Boud

Dylan gave the creative team carte blanche with his entire catalogue, and given the complexity and subtlety of so many of his lyrics — and by no means do they stick to the greatest hits, the selection is very broad — the narrative could have aligned with them more, or at any rate more often.

Rather, the songs, nearly two dozen of them, serve mainly to set the mood, or comment.

But not always: the sequence in Act II when Girl From The North Country is followed by Hurricane is a narrative triumph. And they’re so wonderfully sung.

The production is a winner, with Mark Henderson’s lighting a standout, reinforcing the world-weariness and slight shabbiness of the people and their lives.

But the star is the music. And what a star it is.