Broadway in Orlando review: 'Girl From the North Country' is uneven but deeply affecting in unanticipated ways

Political scientists have been sounding alarm bells over alarming parallels between our current era and the 1930s, when economic inequality and environmental collapse threatened social stability at home, and international conflicts clouded the horizon. However, I didn’t anticipate receiving a sociological history lesson on the subject from a jukebox musical, much less the subtly multilayered and surprisingly moving (if not entirely satisfying) instruction provided by Girl From the North Country, which leads off the Dr. Phillips Center’s 2024/2025 AdventHealth Broadway in Orlando season. (It runs through Sunday, Sept. 29.)

That’s just one way that this acclaimed play by Irish writer/director Conor McPherson with songs by Bob Dylan — which was a London hit before COVID interrupted its Broadway run — defied many of my expectations.

Set in an oddly diverse Duluth during the depths of the Great Depression, the show is narrated Our Town-style by a kindly morphine-dispensing doctor (Alan Ariano), with indebted innkeeper Nick Lanie (John Schiappa, appropriately irascible) as its putative protagonist. But rather than centering around the older white men, the script’s real focus turns out to be on Nick’s mentally deteriorating wife, Elizabeth (Jennifer Blood, giving a remarkably expressive physical performance), and their Black adoptive daughter, Marianne (Sharae Moultrie, quietly luminous), whose mysterious pregnancy forms one of the complex plot’s more compelling threads.

Weaving together so many hard-luck tales — including an unjustly incarcerated pugilist (Matt Manuel), a blackmailing Bible salesman (Jeremy Webb), a widow in probate purgatory (Carla Woods) and a special-needs son (Aidan Wharton) with harried parents (Jill Van Velzer and David Benoit, whose drunken Thanksgiving monologue is a climactic highlight) — it’s inevitable that several of Girl From the North Country’s tangled strands never truly tie up. Likewise, the tone initially tends towards sitcom-snappy while name-checking lynchings and suicide as it sets up expository dominoes, which teeter between tragedy and melodrama when they start to tumble in the second half. Even so, McPherson maintained my engagement thanks to his witty, whiplash-inducing dialogue — which the cast sprints through with crack timing — as well as welcome moments of ineffable silence, such as the ending’s elegiac fade-out.

Stripped of its score, Girl From the North Country would make a fine straight play, so perhaps its biggest surprise is how the musical’s biggest name — 1960s icon Bob Dylan, who contributed nearly two dozen of his classic songs — takes on a supporting role, rather than hogging the spotlight. Unlike virtually every other jukebox musical, Dylan’s songs are not presented diegetically within the context of a biography, nor are they fully integrated into the dramatic storytelling. Instead, music mostly serves as scene transitions, commenting emotionally or thematically on the action without necessarily being literally related to the lyrics.

It also may seem somewhat shocking that several of Dylan’s best-known hits (“Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Blowin’ in the Wind”) are absent, and other favorites are slowed down into funeral dirges or chopped up into snippets.

By recontextualizing his words and melodies without attempting to re-create his albums, Girl From the North Country actually strengthens the case that Dylan was the Woody Guthrie of his generation, whose poetry has become an indelible part of America’s musical folklore. If you still resent Dylan for going electric at Newport in ’65, you’ll love Simon Baker’s Tony-winning acoustic orchestrations, which are performed onstage by the multi-talented cast. And if you’ve somehow never heard this Dylan kid before, these fresh yet timeless interpretations will make you believe Bob’s probably got a promising future ahead of him in today’s folk-influenced indie music scene; maybe he should headline World Cafe on WXPN?

Counterbalancing its narrative and musical complexity, Girl From the North Country is refreshingly understated for a Broadway show from a visual perspective, with desaturated costumes and minimalist sliding set pieces by Rae Smith that look like they could have stepped out of a WPA-era photograph. Along with Mark Henderson’s candle-cozy lighting design, it transforms the cavernous Walt Disney Theater into an intimate shelter from the storm. Similarly, McPherson’s stage blocking of dialogue scenes is sometimes as static as his words are staccato — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since movement director Lucy Hind’s social dancing and pedestrian movement enliven the musical moments.

Much like life itself, Girl From the North Country is convoluted and uneven, but also deeply affecting in unanticipated ways. Its unexpected originality invigorated my sense of empathetic openness, so even if I did exit with some unanswered questions and unscratched itches, I’ll always prefer that over being bored by another by-the-numbers Broadway hit.



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