How can someone who loves Bob Dylan music and someone who doesn't work on a project involving the American singer's songs?
When the project has both nothing to do with the singer and everything to do with the songs.
Girl From North Country heads to the Canberra Theatre Centre next month bringing with it a new life for Bob Dylan's catalogue.
By definition, this production is a musical. Simply put, there are actors on stage who sing while they tell the story - which, for the record, has nothing to do with Dylan, except for the fact that it's set in his birth town, Duluth, Minnesota in the United States.
But, according to Australian musical director Andrew Ross, it's more of a play with music. Ross, himself, isn't the biggest Dylan fan - "vocally he was never the sort of voice I was interested in".
But when it comes to Girl From North Country, he thinks the soundtrack would not work if it wasn't for Dylan's music being presented in this reimagined way. The songs don't speak directly to what is happening, but with tracks including Hurricane, Like a Rolling Stone, To Make You Feel My Love and Forever Young, they do hold the same emotion.
"It doesn't function as a traditional musical. In a musical, the music tends to forward the action and carry the story forward," Ross says.
"In this, it doesn't. The music offers the characters in this boarding house in Duluth in 1934, an emotional release that the play doesn't.
"It's a very stultifying atmosphere in the play and people just getting on with their lives trying to live through the Depression and deal with their life's problems. And so the music functions as an emotional release. It's not a traditional musical, but there's a lot of music in it."
Girl From North Country tells the story of a group of wanderers who cross paths at a guesthouse during the Great Depression. Standing at a turning point in their lives, they begin to realise nothing is what it seems, and as they search for a future, and hide from the past, they find themselves facing unspoken truths about the present.
Written and directed by multi-award-winner Conor McPherson, the Australian iteration of this Broadway and West End hit, stars stage and screen icon Lisa McCune, Peter Kowitz and Helpmann Award winners Peter Carroll, Helen Dallimore and Greg Stone.
The Australian production also features Terry Crawford as Dr Walker - a role that he was born for. Not because he has ever had any desire to be an on-stage physician, but because the actor grew up a Dylan fan.
"Connor reportedly began his writing process by listening to all of Dylan's 40 albums. But because of that immersion in Dylan, the play he's written also reads and plays like a Dylan song with the peculiarities of logic and illogic," Crawford says.
"It's what I've described sometimes as the dash - or the massive dollop - of mystery, that is in Dylan songs. He allows himself to go the most unexpected paths that others wouldn't do.
"He writes things and he breaks rules of songwriting and lyric writing and this breaks rules of playwriting in the same way - he doesn't deliver everything.
"And I think that's the power of Bob Dylan as a songwriter, and I think it's the power of this play."
Girl From North Country is at the Canberra Theatre Centre from August 25 to September 3. Tickets from $69 from canberratheatrecentre.com.au.
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