first night review: girl from the north country @ the saenger theatre

First Night Review: Girl From The North Country @ The Saenger Theatre
Review by Dorian Hatchett 

The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own is called sonder.  It’s one of those rare occurrences that can be deeply unsettling or overwhelmingly joyful. It usually happens to me in airports. 

The Girl From The North Country is perfectly sonder-inducing. Whether that can be credited to the cast, (exemplary) the music, (featuring 20 artfully arranged Bob Dylan songs) the characters (a wildly disparate group of disconnected strangers thrust together by the Great Depression) or some secret greater than the sum of its parts, I cannot say. The result is magic, and it won a Tony and was nominated for 6 others and a Grammy on its Broadway run.  

Shows that feature a cast of unconnected characters brought together by circumstance are common enough.  Thornton Wilder’s Our Town or more recently Johnathan Larson’s Rent explore the idea that humans are naturally social and can find new common ground through experience.  Producers of The Girl from the North Country used the music of Bob Dylan to find that common ground, and the result reaches right down into your heart and wrenches all the nostalgia and sorrow free to circulate through the audience as the lights go down and the voices rise up.  

Set in Duluth, Minnesota during the winter of 1934, the show tells the story of a boarding-house owner and eternal pessimist Nick Laine (John Schiappa) who is on the verge of losing everything, and is doing his best to simply exist in a game he knows he cannot win.  He has demons from his past that inform his thoughts and feelings, and his relationship with his wife Elizabeth (Jennifer Blood) was already on the rocks when she develops a disease that renders her mentally unstable. 

Elizabeth's outbursts act as minor tragedies and occasionally comic relief, as the story winds through the lives of their children Gene and Marianne (Ben Biggers and Sherae Moultrie) and all the boarders in the house. There are infidelities, heartbreaks, and everyone is fleeing from something, whether it be internal or external. 

As an onlooker, you are powerless to help or stop the story as it spins out in front of you and at the crux of this feeling is the true magic of the show. Like the moment in a horror film when you want to scream, “Look out behind you!” as though the actor on the screen can hear you, watching the story come tumbling across the stage to the inevitable conclusions is moving and difficult at times. 

The entire tableau is narrated by Dr. Walker, who sets the scene with a sort of grim detachment (Alan Ariano) and whose painful end seems obvious when it happens but is the twist no one was expecting.  Theatre is about feeling something, and The Girl from the North Country is a masterclass in emotion.  

The Girl From The North Country runs at The Saenger Theatre through October 20th. Click here for further information and ticketing.