Bob Dylan’s self-titled debut album came out 62 years ago. In that time, the music of the quintessentially American singer-songwriter has fully fused itself to modern life, to a point that we don’t always recognize it when it turns up. (Name another artist who’s been covered by Adele, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Phoenix, Elvis Presley and William Shatner.) Dylan’s lyrics, which won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, are timeless in their relatability, which is how Irish playwright Conor McPherson was able to adapt some two dozen of Dylan's songs into a jukebox musical set in 1934—seven years before Dylan was even born.
Girl from the North Country, playing at the Smith Center June 4-9, tells a Depression-era story of resilience set in a rundown guesthouse in Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota. Each of its characters has something weighing them down—alcoholism, depression and dementia, among others—and their struggles toward equilibrium are catalyzed by the arrival of two strangers, a boxer and a bible salesman. The story is driven by a raft of Dylan classics (“Like a Rolling Stone,” “Lay, Lady, Lay”) and left-field surprises (“Jokerman,” “Duquesne Whistle”), reimagined for the stage in period-appropriate orchestrations by Simon Hale, who won a Tony for his efforts.
“I think Conor McPherson captured Dylan,” says David Benoit, who plays North Country’s Mr. Burke. “[McPherson’s] not cookie-cutter; he’s not commercial. The show has almost a rebellious feel. It’s like Connor created his own genre of musical theater.”
In keeping with the spirit of the man who supplied its songbook, Benoit was allowed to make Mr. Burke’s story a bit more personal to him—to take a long, hard look at that fictional life and ask, how does it feel? A failed entrepreneur with massive debts and a family that’s barely holding together, Burke is the kind of broken man Dylan might have identified with when he imagined having “no direction home.”
“He’s a complex character. I love him,” Benoit says. “He’s a businessman from the northeast part of the country, [and] I just happen to be from Fall River, Massachusetts. So, I adopt the dialect that I spent years and thousands of dollars to get rid of, and I embrace it.
“He’s very funny. He’s a blowhard, he’s loud, knows everything about everything—yet he actually knows nothing, and is just overcompensating for being a pretty small man. He’s basically a failure as a father, a businessman and a husband, and it’s a lot of fun to play and to humanize him.”
Burke’s life is just one of several that’s transformed by that night in the guesthouse, and by the music of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer that unknowingly wrote the story of their lives. When he saw the show on Broadway, Dylan himself was taken aback, consumed by the emotions he helped to create: “I just let it happen. The play had me crying at the end. I can’t even say why,” he told the New York Times. “When the curtain came down, I was stunned.”
Benoit can relate; he saw the show long before he was cast in it, and was taken with its humor, pathos and humanity. He believes Smith Center audiences will respond as he did to North Country’s themes of “facing adversity as a community and … uplifting each other.”
And, of course, he knows we’ll love the songs.
“You get this catalogue of music, beautifully sung,” he says. “When I saw the show in New York, I had no idea ever be part of this production, especially in this role. But I was so moved by it. And it stayed with me.”
GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY June 4-9, times vary, $40-$150. Reynolds Hall, thesmithcenter.com.
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