At the end of Tuesday night’s performance of Girl from the North Country — its third at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Minneapolis, and press night for the official launch of the musical’s year-long national tour — I turned to my companion and said, “I’m not sure I followed that, but I really enjoyed it.” She concurred. How Bob Dylan of it — even though Dylan only wrote the songs in the musical, not the play itself.

Let’s go further: Girl from the North Country, which is written and directed by Conor McPherson, resembled Dylan’s own forays into narrative — you know something is happening, even if you don’t grasp all the particulars on the first sitting. It goes fast and contains a lot of characters — upward of a dozen people onstage at a time, many with speaking parts. Think of a song such as “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” (Blood on the Tracks, 1975), or a film like Renaldo and Clara (1978) or Masked and Anonymous (2003), more than, oh, Oklahoma!

Oklahoma itself, in fact, got a number of big laughs when it was mentioned in the play — Tulsa’s Woody Guthrie Center is the home of Dylan’s archives — as did mentions of Bismarck, Pelican Rapids, and Edina, the latter of which was mispronounced with a long-E in the middle. (“Some people say ‘va-geena,’” a character explains — another laugh line.)

So yes, Girl from the North Country is often funny, much in the same way Dylan’s own works are. And it’s tragic, also in the same basic manner. The story is set in Duluth, between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1934, smack in the middle of the Depression, at a guesthouse run by Nick and Elizabeth Laine, the latter of whom has dementia, and their kids, Gene and Marianne, the latter of whom is adopted; she’s also Black while the other Laines are white. Race figures heavily in the narrative — also very Dylanesque. The famous 1920 Duluth lynching of three Black men is one of the musical’s key referents.

The Laines are at the center of a number of interlocked stories, featuring another couple, the Burkes; Black ex-convict Joe Scott, who’s just been sprung from prison after being acquitted of a murder he didn’t commit; Mr. Perry, whom Nick is trying to engage to the pregnant Marianne; Mrs. Neilsen, a Black guesthouse employee who is also having an affair with Nick; and Dr. Walker, who occasionally breaks character to narrate the proceedings. There are others, too. See? Complicated.

But not obtuse, as Dylan’s big ensemble stories can sometimes be. The cast is lively, brisk, and memorable — the ensemble work matters much more than individual performances. But for this Dylan fan — and, I suspect, many others — what is most intriguing is how thoroughly McPherson and the show’s arranger, the British-born Simon Hale, reshaped his songbook.

Allow me to quote Playbill: Dylan’s catalog “includes some of the greatest and most popular songs the world has ever known.” (That’s right: ever! Sit down, “Ode to Joy”!) A casual fan might figure that the classics might not outrun their era — only to run into the fact that Dylan’s primary project of the last few decades has been showing just how many facets that songbook can show, reconfiguring them night to night on the Never Ending Tour. His most recent release, Shadow Kingdom, is a prime example. (I wrote about that one for Rolling Stone.)

McPherson and Hale, with Dylan’s blessing, don’t simply rearrange the hits — they break the songs apart and reassemble them as the drama necessitates. The instruments accompanying the numbers are right on the stage — a bare, weathered-looking drum set is far on stage right, a piano, bass, and guitar far on stage left — and some of the ensemble players go to them at appropriate times. The fit between action and song is seamless — almost eerily so at times.

Sure, it’s no surprise to hear “I Want You” (1966) done as a forlorn lament — but as a duet? To exercise my state-residential privilege a second: That’s different. They make cunning and transformative use of material from Dylan’s turn-of-the-’80s Christian conversion, particularly “What Can I Do for You?” (1980) and “Slow Train” (1979), neither of which do much preaching here. “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965) is delivered not as a rant but as a lament, following a strangling. Then it becomes a band number — and then, oddly on paper but smartly onstage, it veers into a snippet of “To Make You Feel My Love” (1997) for the coda. Or “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” (1967) done up for a square dance, segueing into “Jokerman” (1983) — a combo not even the notoriously whimsical Dylan would have come up with.

That might not have been the case with the night’s one true clunker. “Is Your Love in Vain?” (1978) is not generally considered a Dylan classic, for good reason. It works in the context of Girl from the North Country, though — illustrates a dramatic turn quite aptly, in fact. Or at least the title does. As for the rest of the song, the lines “Can you cook and sew? / Make flowers grow?” are still risible even in another context. You can’t transform everything Dylan does. Somehow, that comes as a relief.