The Bob Dylan musical that made Dylan cry is coming to Philly

“Oh, that just sounds really awful.”

That’s what Irish playwright Conor McPherson said when first approached with the idea to write a play centered on the music of Bob Dylan.

“Musicals — the successful ones — sound a certain way, they have a certain energy. And that’s not Bob Dylan!” said McPherson, who wrote and directed the Tony Award-winning Girl From the North Country, which opens Feb. 27 at the Forrest Theatre.

The show, which premiered in London in 2017, opened at the Public Theater in New York in 2018, and had a COVID-interrupted Broadway run from 2020 to 2022, is now coming to Philly for 16 performances.

“The idea seemed cynical, or something out of a Spinal Tap mock documentary,” he said with a laugh on Zoom, from his home in Dublin. “‘Yeah, we’re going to do a Bob Dylan musical.’”

But then he gave it a second thought.

“I love music,” he said. “And if you had something set in the 1930s that was a Eugene O’Neill kind of play, and you had Bob Dylan songs that were a representation of an inner portrait of the characters on some subconscious level, could that be interesting?”

His agent thought so. So McPherson “put it down in this little two-page treatment of a story set during the Depression in Duluth in Minnesota,” where Dylan was born in 1941.

Girl From the North Country takes its title from one of Dylan’s most tender love songs. It first appeared on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963 and was recast as a duet with Johnny Cash on Nashville Skyline in 1969.

It differs in approach from touring jukebox musicals like Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations, which recently completed a run at the Academy of Music, and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, which arrives at the Walnut Street Theatre next month.

Those shows are musical bio plays that tell the life stories of their subjects.

McPherson imagined something different. An Our Town-style ensemble drama set in a boardinghouse on the shores of Lake Superior, with an itinerant cast of characters laid low by hard times. “A family who’d lost their business, a boxer trying to make a comeback, a preacher selling Bibles. Maybe there could be a love story, and Bob Dylan songs.”

He doesn’t know why he was asked to submit ideas.

Had Dylan seen his celebrated 1997 drama The Weir? McPherson has no idea.

What he does know is Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, read his treatment aloud to the singer after a concert in 2014. And Girl From the North Country got an immediate thumbs up.

A truck pulled up to his house with a box full of 60 or so Dylan albums on CD. McPherson had played in bands and considered a music career until David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross changed his life, but he wasn’t a Dylanophile.

“I loaded them all into my iPod and would go on long walks with Dylan on shuffle.”

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Twenty-eight songs are used in the play, performed by onstage musicians on 1930s-era instruments. Many are lesser titles that may be unfamiliar to even ardent Dylan fans, such as “Sign On the Window” from New Morning, “Is Your Love In Vain?” from Street-Legal, and “What Can I Do for You?” from Saved.

“It was really about personal response,” McPherson said. “If I really like this, I know the excitement I feel will transmit to the performers and the audience. And of course I knew I wasn’t going to get away without putting ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ in there or ‘Hurricane’ or ‘Forever Young.’ ... But we don’t do ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ We don’t do ‘Blowin’ In the Wind.’”

To work up new Dylan versions for the cast — which at the Forrest includes Philly native Chiara Trentalange, who as Kate Draper is spotlighted on “I Want You” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” — McPherson teamed with arranger Simon Hale.

The songs in Girl From the North Country “make you feel things,” said Hale, who has worked with Jamiroquai and Ray Davies, and did string arrangements for Duncan Sheik’s Tony-winning Spring Awakening. “It is a musical, but not in the sense of a lyric furthering the plot or character. It’s a little bit more abstract.”

Dylan, he said, “has never been precious about other people doing his songs. And he’s constantly reinforcing the need to follow your own vision and do whatever you feel is right. Which is a brilliant thing for any artist to hear.”

Girl From the North Country was nominated for seven Tonys, including best musical and best direction and book for a musical. Hale was a winner, taking home a best orchestrations trophy.

Like Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour” — which Phillies fans at spring training in Florida should note plays Clearwater on March 5 and 6 — Girl From the North Country keeps on keepin’ on. It’s been to Australia and New Zealand, the U.K. and Ireland, and began its current North American tour in Minnesota in October.

“I can’t figure it out,” McPherson says. “It’s still resonating in my life, for sure. I can’t see it coming. I don’t know where it came from. And it just goes on in some weird way. I’m just happy that the performers are out there doing it, and getting the response. It’s lovely to know.”

One of the audience members that responded to the show is Dylan himself, who dropped in to see a performance at the Public in New York in 2018.

“I’ve seen it, and it affected me,” he told Douglas Brinkley in 2020. “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.”

“Girl From the North Country” at the Forrest Theatre, 1114 Walnut St., from Feb. 27 to March 10. $45-$151.50, 215-923-1515, forrest-theatre.com