Conor McPherson assumes he wasn’t the only one.
“I was approached by representatives of Bob Dylan’s record company who were looking, I think, to try to generate a theater show using Bob Dylan’s music,” says McPherson, the writer and director of “Girl From the North Country,” during a recent phone interview.
A native of Dublin, McPherson is a prolific playwright and screenwriter. Many of his works are Irish dramas, but his extensive list of credits also includes the 2020 adaptation of “Artemis Fowl” for Walt Disney Pictures.
Still, something’s missing from that resume.
“I’d never done a musical,” McPherson says. “Also, I wasn’t sure that what I knew of Bob Dylan’s music that it was that kind of music anyway.”
And yet McPherson — on the phone from Minneapolis, where the Playhouse Square-bound North American tour of the show was about to launch — certainly was intrigued.
The record company sent him all of Dylan’s albums, which he says he loaded onto his iPod to listen to on walks close to home. On one, an idea hit him: He saw a boarding house in 1930s America.
“You (have) these different people staying there because, in the Depression, they don’t have anywhere to live — and these people are encountering each other and their lives are crisscrossing over a few days,” he says. “And then if you had Bob’s songs somehow articulating their inner lives, I thought that might work.
“You know, it was a strange idea, I suppose.”
Ultimately, though, it had to resonate with one person.
“I wrote down a couple of pages (of ideas) and sent it off, and then within about a week, I heard back that Bob Dylan really liked this particular idea, this approach, and gave me carte blanche to go ahead and start developing it.”
“Girl From the North Country” is set, specifically, in 1934, in a guesthouse in Duluth, Minnesota — the city where Dylan was born — and features 20 of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee’s songs. The arrangements of those songs, by Simon Hale, use only instruments from that era. Some songs (“All Along the Watchtower,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Forever Young”) are better known than others (“Went to See the Gypsy,” “Sweetheart Like You,” “Is Your Love in Vain?”). Of course, the show’s title comes from an early Dylan classic and is used in the show, as well.
Choosing from Dylan’s huge catalog would not be easy, and McPherson says he made his selections on those headphones-enhanced walks. If a song struck him in a certain way — if it “affected” him — he made a note of it.
“That was usually a pretty instinctive response, a personal response,” he says. “(There was a feeling that) we could translate it in some way that an audience is going to hear it in a new way. Hopefully, they’ll like it, too. That’s all I could do, really.”
Reworking Dylan songs, to one degree or another, isn’t exactly a new idea. The hugely influential artist has been covered countless times over the years, and if you’ve seen him in concert over the last several decades, you know he rarely performs a song closely to how it sounds on an album.
That his songs are so reshapable speaks to his “God-given gift as a songwriter,” McPherson says.
“They have a deceptive simplicity — I think they’re very sturdy, the songs,” he says. “His songwriting is just so robust that, as you say, you can pull them in lots of different directions and they still stand there, you know, very secure.”
Furthermore, McPherson says, Dylan has made a habit of going “through an unexpected door, musically, and it’s always the right door somehow.”
Sometimes his songs seem so simple that one could get the wrong idea.
“That makes you think, ‘Oh, that must be quite easy to try to do,’ You think, ‘OK, maybe I can have a go at writing a kind of Bob Dylan-type song, musically and lyrically.’ But you try it (laughs), and it’s very hard to do something that’s both simple-seeming and original. That’s the genius.”
McPheron heaps praise on Hale for his role in creating the show, saying the composer and arranger could quickly translate McPherson’s ideas for a particular song into something usable and offered lots of ideas himself.
“Simon has a wonderful, very fast musical facility that enables you to move forward and try things without wasting a lot of time,” he says. “And when you try something and it’s good and it works and sticks, great; and if it doesn’t work, fine, we will move on really fast. He’s just an excellent collaborator.”
Running Oct. 31 through Nov. 19 at the Connor Palace in Cleveland as part of Playhouse Square’s 2023-24 KeyBank Broadway Series, “Girl From the North Country” debuted in London in 2017 and made it to Broadway in 2020, earning positive reviews and accolades — including Hale’s Tony Award for Best Orchestrations — along the way.
Oh, and Dylan? Yes, he seemed to appreciate the finished product.
“It affected me,” he told Douglas Brinkley in a 2020 New York Times interview. “I saw it as an anonymous spectator, not as someone who had anything to do with it. I just let it happen. The play had me crying at the end. I can’t even say why. When the curtain came down, I was stunned. I really was.”
Obviously, seeing those comments meant a great deal to McPherson.
“It’s so strange — because I never met Bob Dylan,” he says. “And I don’t know him, you know? But when you go on a journey like this, you’re sort of in a way going to quite a strangely intimate relationship with someone whose work you know.
“I just felt a personal connection to the work, and I have a huge admiration for him,” McPherson continues. “Before I did this project … I had probably six Bob Dylan albums, I suppose, but never got into the whole breadth of his whole career. But doing this show — that enabled me to go on that journey.
“I hoped if he ever saw (the show), he would like it, of course. And then when he saw it and spoke about how much it moved him, it was a huge moment of validation.”
‘Girl From the North Country’
Where: Playhouse Square’s Connor Palace.
When: Oct. 31 through Nov. 19.
Tickets: $25 to $115.
Info: 216-241-6000 or PlayhouseSquare.org.
