"A rich and strange marriage of the talents...If you’re a hard-core Dylan fan, you’ve heard these songs before. But, for me at least, they’ve never sounded quite so heartbreakingly personal and universal at the same time...The most imaginative and inspired use to date of a popular composer’s songbook in this blighted era of the jukebox musical...A uniformly excellent American cast that wears its roles like confining and prickly skins."
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"The show makes Dylan’s songs as unfamiliar as it can; it freezes them in timelessness...'Girl from the North Country' doesn’t have much plot, but it provides a compelling setting for Dylan’s plangent lyrics, whose range encompasses yearning, bitter confusion and grace. McPherson uses Dylan’s songs as atmosphere in the broadest sense: They are the air the characters breathe. And when the musical’s cool gains force, it acquires a piercing chill."
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"The play is a somber, self-serious affair. In searching for the soul in Dylan’s tunes, McPherson, who also directs the show, and his orchestrator and arranger Simon Hale have consistently sapped them of their mischievous spark...'Girl From the North Country' never quite stops feeling like a dirge, and though its large cast is full of marvelous singers, their individual characters are less real people than they are a hodgepodge of archetypal Americana."
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"McPherson attempts to surround several of Dylan’s tunes with a frame vague enough to contain their poetry and broad enough to relate their social truths...A show that fully accepted the challenge of Dylan’s elusive balance between unstable consciousness and tough social fact might have told more of its story through the lives of these two women...A different setting in time might have helped as well...McPherson offers up plenty of people...but never a voice, or a mind, like Dylan’s."
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"Conor McPherson’s radiant musical is as eccentric and unclassifiable as any fellow traveler of Dylan should be. A remarkable piece of theater, 'Girl' opens tonight at the Public Theater with an impeccable cast...One of the best ensemble performances in recent memory...The Dylan songs – culled from his entire career to date and sung by the uniformly excellent cast – don’t so much unfold the narrative as convey mood and characters’ interiors"
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"Some of Dylan’s songs are a poor fit for this highly specific setting...But that doesn’t invalidate McPherson’s insight that Dylan’s narrative lyrics express a sense of existential detachment, of longing for connection that reflect the uncertainties of 1930s America...Better to sit back and just enjoy the music — and credit McPherson with giving each song the gift of clarity. If not always apropos to their dramatic moments, the lyrics are clearly intelligible."
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"Rather than artificially shoehorning songs into a purpose-built narrative, McPherson artfully builds a novelistic tapestry of archetypal figures, the poor and disenfranchised of an America suspended in time, using Dylan's pungently expressive lyrics...These people and their grim situations are carved out of a familiar Americana mold, and yet under McPherson's probing direction, the actors transcend melodramatic cliché, endowing their characters with battered humanity."
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"For me, the heartbreak is that Conor McPherson, an artist dear to my heart, has written and staged such a disappointing play...More problematic than the loose, decorative deployment of the songs is the play itself. McPherson seems to have ransacked every cliché he could find about American society and culture between the wars, and shoehorned them into a narrative that meanders without momentum."
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