All things grow: Justin Peck is transforming Sufjan Stevens’ album into ‘Illinoise,’ a different kind of stage musical

The choreographer Justin Peck shot to theatrical fame with the 2018 Broadway revival of “Carousel,” then for Steven Spielberg’s 2021 movie “West Side Story,” and in this New York rehearsal room, the lush melodies of Richard Rodgers and Leonard Bernstein seem to be lingering in the air.

But Peck, who is still only 36, is actually intently working to the music of his friend Sufjan Stevens, a Detroit-born singer-songwriter whose deeply esoteric music has variously been described as indie rock, electronica, baroque pop, chamber pop or even folktronica. Stevens is one of those musicians whose name spoken in a bar elicits either blank stares or instant rhapsodic monologues — as you might expect from one whose work often has featured unusual instrumentation and such song subjects as birds, freeways, zodiac symbols and figure skaters.

Stevens’ followers, though, are akin to Stephen Sondheim groupies. One of Stevens’ Tumblr fan sites comes with the heading, “Between hipsters and God, there is Sufjan Stevens,” reminiscent of New York magazine’s famed “Is Sondheim God?” headline from 1994. Those fans see in Stevens’ dense music, released on his own record label Asthmatic Kitty, a vessel for their own feelings, a kindred spirit, even a kind of spiritual guide. Writing a few years ago in Vice, Danny Wright said of Stevens, “he’s shown that he can crush your chest like an empty can regardless of whether he’s playing 20 instruments or one.”

Somewhere after the turn of the millennium, Stevens (who declined to be interviewed for this piece) came up with the idea of recording an album for every state in the union — an organizing principal, you might say, akin to August Wilson writing a play for every decade in the 20th century. But he only ever recorded two entries in his Fifty States project, later dismissing the whole enterprise: “Michigan,” a 2003 album with tracks about Detroit and the Upper Peninsula, but also Flint, Romulus (home of the Detroit airport) and Holland (Stevens went to Hope College). Not that he restricted himself to cities: there’s also “Wolverine” and the melancholic “Vito’s Ordination Song” about a friend of his, the Rev. Thomas Vito Aiuto, who became a minister.

In 2005, Stevens released “Illinois,” which now has been turned into a theater piece that will premiere officially on Feb. 3 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, before moving to the Park Avenue Armory in New York and then, its commercial producers hope, to Broadway.

“Illinois,” which was workshopped at Bard College’s Fisher Center last summer, is now called “Illinoise” — the added “e” no doubt helping with online searches for the show but also a nod to the track “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!” (Part I being “The World’s Columbian Exposition” and Part II being “Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream”). Other tracks on the “Illinois” album reflect Stevens’ offbeat tone and sensibility: surely the only song ever written about Casimir Pulaski Day, an ode to Superman of Metropolis, and a track about the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. “We’re incredibly excited to have the premiere of this project,” says Rick Boynton, Chicago Shakespeare’s creative producer, as he heads into rehearsal.

What exactly is “Illinoise?” You might call it a performance hybrid although Peck says that it was “very important to me” that the work live in the theatrical world, rather than that of dance, where he already has formidable clout as resident choreographer at the New York City Ballet and where he probably could have forged this work with less angst than making a theater piece.

The piece is unusual in that it is based on a specific album, not a body of work in the traditional jukebox musical fashion. But if you’re looking for a Broadway antecedent, the closest example might be Twyla Tharp’s 2002 project, “Movin’ Out,” which also debuted in Chicago, and that ennobled with movement the music of Billy Joel (there are rumors of a Broadway revival). Stevens and Joel are far removed with what’s on stage, of course, but both pieces clearly wrestle with how much narrative to forge. With “Movin’ Out,” Tharp created the whole thing; Peck has brought on the noted playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (”Fairview”) to help him fashion a narrative.

In essence, each of the dancers plays a character who emerges from around a campfire, where this group of Illinois “creative types” (in Peck’s description) has regularly gathered, and tells their personal story, as inspired by one of the tracks on the album.

“It’s not unlike ‘A Chorus Line,’” Peck says. “Everyone gets to tell their story. But there also is a central protagonist.”

“It’s a new narrative,” Drury says, “Inspired by the album. I see it in part as the nostalgic, coming-of-age story of a queer guy who is in love with his best friend in a small Midwestern town in the early 2000s,” which is of course when Stevens recorded “Illinois.”

The dancers don’t sing, at least not in a lead-vocal kind of way. But the piece comes with a big orchestra and three vocalists singing Stevens’ lyrics. That all comes with its own potential issues. Like the Grateful Dead, Stevens long has been known for changing how and what he plays from one live show to another and a theatrical version seeking free-flowing emotion and catharsis can’t get too hung up on a precise re-creation of his studio albums — especially when audiences will be listening to three different voices, as distinct from Stevens himself.

“I want to do right by Sufjan and also honor the experience of listening to one of the best albums of the last 20 years,” Peck says, which explains the huge attention paid to the music here, especially when it came to selecting musicians capable of working in what you might call the Stevens gestalt (many have worked with the man himself).

Watching rehearsal, you can see themes emerge: the clash between small-town Illinois and the big city of Chicago, the identity of Chicago as a kind of way-station before carrying on to full New York self-actualization, the need to find one’s voice, the pressure to find one’s tribe. So to speak. So to dance.

Peck clearly is adored by his dancers, all of whom recognize that most of what they can do, he can do himself. They see him as one of the art form’s true intellectual artists and a pusher of long-established emotional boundaries, very much at ease with everything from syncopation to the self-actualizing dancer. “You want to feel a glow,” he says to one of his rapt performers at one point. “That is what sets the tone.”

How well did Stevens really know Illinois? Well, he certainly played Chicago’s Pitchfork Festival in 2016, the Chicago Theatre in 2015, Metro in 2012 (his weird singalong Christmas tour), Champaign’s High Dive in 2009, more early Metro and Riviera gigs and Shubas in 2004, not to mention other downstate folk festivals, but this isn’t a travelogue and the Illinois landscape under review here is far more metaphoric than geographic.

“This is someone who has the innate ability to write great music for dance and theater,” Peck says. “It’s genre-defying and genre bending. Sometimes it feels like show tunes with massive orchestrations. I really just felt that there was something important to explore in this music. And I wanted to give us the challenge of creating a show that is a satisfying piece of theater. I feel there is a way here to try and make sense of life.”

Peck has been widely heralded as one of the best choreographers of his generation, with good reason, and as he talks about this piece you sense his growing realization that what he chooses to set his work on will define the coming peak of his career. Clearly, he sees the pitfalls of falling into established grooves. “I am trying to present a movement language here,” he says, “that is unique to the artist I am.”

“I cry every time I see it,” Drury says as she watches. “You get to experience what it feels like to fall in love.”

Chicago is, of course, a logical place for “Illinoise” to premiere, given that the city gave its name to one of Stevens’ biggest hits. The refrain to “Chicago” is both melodically sticky and, most Chicagoans surely would allow, apt.

And that’s even before Peck got started.

You came to take us

All things go, all things go

To recreate us

All things grow, all things grow.

In previews from Jan. 28, opening Feb. 3 and running through Feb. 18 at Chicago Shakespeare’s Yard Theater on Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave.; 312-595-5600 and www.chicagoshakes.com

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com