Entertainment

Where Everybody Must Sing Dylan

Bob Dylan’s fans may cherish his original recordings, but we all love a good cover version, if only as grist for arguments over who does him better. PJ Harvey or Madeleine Peyroux? Bryan Ferry or Cassandra Wilson? Hendrix or Harrison? Nico or Cat Power?

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Rob Weinert-Kendt
, New York Times

Bob Dylan’s fans may cherish his original recordings, but we all love a good cover version, if only as grist for arguments over who does him better. PJ Harvey or Madeleine Peyroux? Bryan Ferry or Cassandra Wilson? Hendrix or Harrison? Nico or Cat Power?

We might think of Conor McPherson’s new play with music, “Girl From the North Country” (starting previews at the Public Theater) as a kind of theatrical cover version. It’s certainly not a “jukebox” musical, though it weaves more than 20 Dylan songs into an original play set in northern Minnesota during the Depression.

While those are roughly the time and place of Dylan’s birth, this is not a bio-musical, like the Carole King show, “Beautiful,” either. And it’s definitely not a dance-ical, à la Twyla Tharp’s misbegotten Dylan anthology, “The Times They Are a-Changin,'” on Broadway in 2006.

Instead, the multicharacter drama McPherson has written, the first original work by this Irish playwright that is set in America, represents a sidelong route into Dylan’s musical and cultural roots.

The idea arose after Dylan’s management team, which was soliciting proposals for theatrical projects featuring his song catalog, approached McPherson. A Dylan admirer who’s since become a superfan, McPherson contributed a two-page pitch that didn’t just win approval, but also got him carte blanche.

From the time of the show’s creation for the Old Vic in London — which led to a hit run on the West End last year — until now, McPherson has had no contact with Dylan except through intermediaries, who have granted him license to use any song in the catalog, however he wants.

How did McPherson — whose plays include “The Weir,” “The Seafarer” and “Shining City” — choose which songs to include and where, and how have they been adapted? I talked to him and his collaborators about a prime selection on a break from rehearsal at the Public, where the show opens Oct. 1.

‘Hurricane’

The characters in the boardinghouse where “Girl From the North Country” unfolds aren’t lifted from, or directly inspired by, any of Dylan’s songs. But Joe Scott, an African-American boxer apparently on the run from the law, can’t help evoking the case of Rubin Carter, known as the Hurricane, the middleweight boxer whose wrongful conviction for murder and subsequent imprisonment were the subject of this rousing Dylan protest song from 1976.

Having Joe sing “Hurricane,” McPherson admitted, is “a bit on the nose,” calling the character and song choice “a prehistoric throwback” to his first attempts to dramatize Dylan’s work. “It’s lasted only because I like the song so much.”

In the show, it also serves as a sort of ensemble dance number after a tipsy Thanksgiving dinner. For Sydney James Harcourt, who plays Joe, the song’s celebratory staging is pointedly at odds with its message of disenfranchisement.

“That juxtaposition is really a kind of brilliant mechanism,” Harcourt said. “Coming out of a Thanksgiving shindig, I decide to sing about wrongful incarceration!” Citing Joel Grey’s M.C. in “Cabaret” as a touchstone, he said, “In my mind’s eye, the footlights at the edge of stage pop on, and I’m looking out at you guys: This is what happened to me, what happened to the Hurricane, and it’s happening in your city.”

‘Slow Train’

Harcourt also sings this song, the almost-title track from “Slow Train Coming,” one of Dylan’s three albums as a born-again Christian. That early-1980s period of his career was considered a betrayal by many, including the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, who characterized himself as a Dylan fan “to an almost scary degree.”

“I did not follow him down that path, and I didn’t own a copy of ‘Saved’ for years,” Eustis said, referring to another of Dylan’s Christian albums.

For McPherson — a nonreligious person whose plays nevertheless relentlessly circle supernatural themes, and who said that “a lot of the time, I’m writing a kind of Nativity play” — Dylan’s Christian period is a great source of inspiration.

What’s striking, McPherson said, is that in the late 1970s, after more than a decade as rock’s mystery man, Dylan started “singing in a way that you know exactly what he’s saying.”

“Suddenly you’re getting this glimpse into the engine room of his passions,” McPherson continued, “and especially if you look at all the live performances then, he absolutely means it.”

Harcourt said he saw “Slow Train” as both cautionary and hopeful — though not too hopeful.

“It’s saying, if you live right, I promise there is salvation coming, something that is going to be better,” he said. “But the emphasis is on the ‘slow.’ A ‘slow train’ doesn’t mean I can see the lights on the track. It could be five, 10, 15 years from now, but it’s coming.”

‘Like a Rolling Stone’

The only real Dylan hit McPherson selected (unless you count a few repurposed lines of “Make You Feel My Love”) is sung by Elizabeth, the boardinghouse proprietor’s wife, who suffers from some kind of dementia but isn’t as mentally absent as she often appears.

She unleashes this song’s famous litany at a moment in the show that Mare Winningham, who plays the role at the Public, called “the weirdest non sequitur, but it weirdly works.”

“You’ve met all the characters,” she explained, “and it’s been unfolding how each one separately is a drifter or a fugitive or a lost soul, or in some kind of pain. And she sings, ‘How does it feel?’ It’s a moment where time stops, and this one character speaks for the whole group.”

That sympathetic reading of the song’s chorus would seem to depart from the sneering effrontery of Dylan’s vocal delivery. Indeed, that “mountain of an iconic recording,” as McPherson put it, has made this “the hardest song to figure out how to present” in both productions.

The effort paid off in London: Shirley Henderson won an Olivier for the role. Winningham said the song was getting extra attention here as well. Rehearsals typically end, she said, with just her, McPherson and the orchestrator Simon Hale “playing around with it, singing it for half an hour or so, messing around with it.”

“It’s kind of been taken apart and put back together,” she observed. ‘Tight Connection to My Heart’

Another song that McPherson and Hale have stripped and reassembled is this glossy pop ditty from the less than beloved 1985 album “Empire Burlesque” (with a positively bonkers music video directed by Paul Schrader), here transformed into a soulful, stately lament, with choral backup, for Marianne, the black adopted daughter of the white couple who run the boardinghouse.

More than many songs in the show, “Tight Connection to My Heart” seems to reflect its character’s desperation. But McPherson rejects the idea that it necessarily represents Marianne singing about herself or her situation. As he put it, “We found that the more the songs had nothing to do with what was happening, the better it fit.”

The reason, he ventured, is that Dylan’s lyrics are “so suggestive, universal and penetrating all at the same time.”

“It’s like actually real literature,” he explained, evidently agreeing with the committee that awarded the Nobel Prize to Dylan in 2016. “It’s a bit like, say, at a funeral, someone says, ‘I’d like to read a poem now by Philip Larkin,’ and it’s a poem that has nothing to do with death, yet somehow everyone goes, ‘That poem was really perfect.’ Bob Dylan is that kind of writer.”

‘I Want You’

This bouncy charmer from the 1966 album “Blonde on Blonde” has been slowed down into a heartfelt plea sung by a young man, Gene (Colton Ryan), whose love for a young woman, Kate (Caitlin Houlahan), is not requited. Dylan’s original vocals imply a melody more than nail one down. “That happens a lot, where the melodies are often inferred,” McPherson said. “But when you actually go to the inferred melodies, they’re stunning.”

Singing the exact notes, though, risks losing another element of the original. As McPherson put it, the throwaway quality of Dylan’s vocals means that the song “is not needy, it’s very strong.” Might a heartfelt, on-pitch rendition cramp that style?

“No, because what he actually sings in the verses is so impossible to understand that it escapes the neediness — he doesn’t really seem to be asking for anything,” said McPherson, citing the song’s hallucinatory images (a guilty undertaker, the Queen of Spades, a dancing child).

The space between feeling and knowing may be McPherson’s favorite spot. “That’s the way theater works for me,” he said, “within the tension that’s created between not understanding what’s going on and yet, at the same time, absolutely feeling you do know. Somewhere in that vibration is the great feeling.”

To put it another way: Something is happening, but you do know what it is.

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