‘Illinoise’ Theater Review: Justin Peck Transforms Sufjan Stevens’ Concept Album Into a Soaring Rush of Late Adolescent Experience

The setting for Illinoise, Justin Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s emotionally supercharged reinterpretation of the 2005 Sufjan Stevens concept album, is various locations across the Land of Lincoln — a cornfield, a hiking trail, a woodland clearing, the suburban home of a serial killer, a small town in the middle of nowhere, the top of a skyscraper and, of course, Chicago, with an out-of-state detour to New York City. But the real setting of this thrilling dance-musical-concert hybrid, alternately rhapsodic and shattering, is our collective youth.

Without a word of spoken dialogue, the show pulls us into late adolescence, a time when love, anguish and everything in between are felt perhaps with the greatest intensity. The book co-written by director-choreographer Peck and Drury (who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with her brilliant meta-theatrical race inquiry, Fairview) is skillfully shaped yet invisible in the best sense of undiluted physical, sensorial and elemental storytelling.

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We haven’t seen dance used as a primary narrative delivery system with this much power or expressiveness on Broadway since Twyla Tharp’s landmark Billy Joel musical, Movin’ Out, closed in 2005.

Illinoise comes to Broadway for a limited 16-week engagement from its sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory, and prior to that, at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Bard SummerScape. The production has all the signs of a work fine-tuned along the way to heighten its at times almost overwhelming emotional impact and mold its series of vignettes into a cohesive narrative.

We feel the ascendant joys and precipitous sorrows of the characters directly through the 12 dancers’ moving bodies in loose-limbed choreography by Peck that can be tortured and convulsive or ecstatic but always organic. Moments early on in which the dancers bounce off each other’s bodies give the illusion of one human extending into another, breaking apart and then reforming with what seems like natural spontaneity. The bursts of movement in unison are all the more dynamic because Peck uses them sparingly.

For queer audiences, especially, the show offers an intensely moving depiction of the ache of unrequited love, ameliorated but not erased by friendship, and the transporting high of reciprocated passion, of that decisive step away from teenage romance toward a more adult understanding of a relationship’s give and take.

Stevens’ swooning melodies, both lush and ethereal, and lyrics that are whimsical one moment and piercing the next, only occasionally are interpreted literally. More often, the songs serve as abstract reflections of the stories being shared by the dancers. I would never have believed anything could come close to seeing Stevens perform live with his dazzling orchestral assemblies. But the music here not only sounds glorious, it takes on profound new meaning through the visuals.

Scenic designer Adam Rigg has created a split-level playing space backed by a billboard that intermittently cues the song titles. Three stupendously talented vocalist-musicians, Shara Nova (who sang on the original Illinois album), Tasha Viets-VanLear and Elijah Lyons, perform on platforms above the stage; they wear butterfly wings, an emergence motif that appears throughout the show.

Behind them, 11 more musicians play on an upper deck, led by music director Nathan Coci, with elements like a banjo, vibraphone, flute and French horn honoring the multi-instrumental richness of Stevens’ ornate chamber pop. The orchestrations and arrangements by Timo Andres, who has collaborated with Stevens on two albums, are ravishing.

The central character, Henry (Ricky Ubeda), is first seen slipping out of bed, bidding a melancholy farewell to his New York boyfriend Douglas (Ahmad Simmons). Returning to his home state, Illinois, in a daze, Henry’s head is a chaotic whirl of pain and anxiety and guilt, a state represented by orbs of light carried by other dancers, swarming around him.

He gets welcomed into a campfire circle of young hikers toasting smores and clutching notebooks, from which they take turns telling stories. Henry is haunted by visions of three key figures in his life: his boyhood crush Carl (Ben Cook), Carl’s first love Shelby (Gaby Diaz) and Douglas. It’s clear Henry has a story to tell, but when invited to do so by the group, he declines.

Instead, other members step forward, including Morgan (Rachel Lockhart), who tangles with conflicted thoughts on her ancestors in “Jacksonville;” Jo Daviess (Jeanette Delgado), forever trying to outrun the dead white men that still have such a hold on America in “They Are Night Zombies;” and Wayne (Alejandro Vargas), who dons a clown suit, entering the homicidal world of “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” and finding his own secrets no less damning. (If Nova’s angelic falsetto on the line, “Oh my God, are you one of them?” doesn’t send shivers down your spine, check your hearing.)

Finally, Clark (Brandt Martinez) steps in to dispel the raw feelings stirred up by these tales with a celebration of his childhood idol Superman in “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts,” a gingham picnic tablecloth fluttering in the wind as his cape. The notion of a hero capable of saving us all is revealed to be hollow, but the characters find comfort in community.

The second half of the show throws the focus back to Henry as the honesty and openness of his new friends give him the courage to share his story. That confession is accompanied by songs including “Decatur,” “Chicago,’ and most memorably, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us.” Henry reveals the elation of his time with Carl, as the line separating friendship from romance dissolves; Shelby’s gradual exclusion and exit; his road trip to New York with Carl; his first encounter with Douglas; and the awful news that brought first Carl and then Henry back home.

While anyone who’s ever wiped away tears listening to “Casimir Pulaski Day” will anticipate the coming tragedy, the show’s most plangent sequence is set to “The Seer’s Tower,” a chillingly staged parade of death that’s absolutely gutting. But the dancing, like the music, is art that destroys then rebuilds you, and the show ends on a note that’s refreshingly old-fashioned, a salute to the healing powers of love and community that seems almost like a throwback to an era before cynicism.

It’s hard to single out individual dancers in such a stellar company, but Ubeda is wonderful, channeling Henry’s innocence as much as the happiness or devastation that envelops him at different points.

His pas de deux with Simmons has the men winding their limbs and torsos around one another with a liquid grace that’s beautiful to behold, conveying with scorching sensuality the mutual intoxication of two people who can’t keep their hands off each other. The other high point for me was the mesmerizing Lockhart’s “Jacksonville” interlude, her dizzyingly sinuous vitality expertly blended with the contrasting rat-a-tat footwork of tap virtuoso Byron Tittle.

The lead dancers are also more than capable actors — Cook makes Carl a blond golden boy, with so much magnetic energy that watching him break under the weight of ineffable sadness rips your heart out. No less moving is Diaz, who embodies both the pathos and the dignity with which Shelby accepts her fate.

Along with the set and costumes (by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung), the key craft element is Garth MacAleavey’s sound design, which makes every lyric clear as a bell, every note of music crystalline.

And Brandon Stirling Baker’s lighting is magical, bathing the dancers in pools of mournful darkness or liberating light. In the uplifting final song, “The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders,” rays of light flood through the branches of pine trees suspended upside-down way up in the flies, creating a cathedral effect. Which feels appropriate given that for the Sufjan Stevens faithful — and maybe even for many casual fans or those unfamiliar with his music — Illinoise will be a religious experience.

Venue: St. James Theatre, New York
Cast: Ben Cook, Gaby Diaz, Ahmad Simmons, Ricky Ubeda, Kara Chan, Jeanette Delgado, Christine Flores, Rachel Lockhart, Brandt Martinez, Craig Salstein, Byron Tittle, Alejandro Vargas
Vocalists: Elijah Lyons, Shara Nova, Tasha Viets-VanLear
Music and lyrics: Sufjan Stevens
Book: Justin Peck, Jackie Sibblies Drury
Director-choreographer: Justin Peck
Set designer: Adam Rigg
Costume designers: Reid Bartelme, Harriet Jung
Lighting designer: Brandon Stirling Baker
Sound designer: Garth MacAleavey
Music director: Nathan Coci
Orchestrations and arrangements: Timo Andres
Presented by Orin Wolf, Seaview, John Styles, David Binder

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