Dylan Musical Is “Brilliant”
Benedict Nightingale writes: ‘Think of Mamma Mia, whose format Girl from the North Country shares, and then think again. Long and hard. The musical at London’s Old Vic, which has attracted rave reviews, is ten times more interesting, a hundred times more sophisticated than that Greek-island romance. How could it be otherwise when the songs that pepper the story are all by Bob Dylan, whose worst ditty makes ABBA’s best seem terminally unimaginative and bland? How otherwise when that story is told by Conor McPherson, the Irish dramatist who won an Olivier award for The Weir
and Tony nominations for Shining City and The Seafarer? Mark you, there’s something oddly disjunctive about a show that is in large part a tribute to Dylan’s edgy muse. Girl from the North Country is set in Duluth, Minnesota, yet its action occurs almost a decade before the composer was born there. His interpolated songs never take the story forward and don’t always follow logically on what the characters have just said.
