‘Illinoise’ review: Moving Broadway show is about love, loss — and dance

“Illinoise,” which opened Thursday at the St. James Theatre, is the closest Broadway may well ever get to putting an indie motion picture onstage. 

A unhappy-then-uplifting hipster fantasy told primarily in entrancing dance, it is like some thing out of Sundance — a tale of damaged fashionable younger people today therapeutically coming to grips with their pasts jointly.

And, when my gut tells me the demonstrate from New York Town Ballet resident choreographer Justin Peck that’s set to the music of Sufjan Stevens is not really a musical, per se, it is a transporting and soul-stirring knowledge all the identical.

A quartet of singers, stationed god-like on tall platforms above a painted plywood phase, complete Stevens’ 2005 album, a richly layered Midwestern time capsule, as they seem down on the movers down below. 

Henry (Ricky Ubeda) has spontaneously left his New York apartment to go on an autumn hike, and stumbled throughout eleven men and women close to a campfire sharing trippy tales they’ve penned. Whimsically they carry glowing orbs, like Godzilla fireflies.

The to start with 50 % of “Illinoise” is produced up of disparate episodic vignettes once in a while with structured plots, and never ever with any dialogue or character singing like you’d find in a standard musical. For millennial viewers, the structure provides to intellect the deep-in-the-woods, young-grownup horror collection “Are You Scared of the Dark?”

1 tale, led by the fabulous Alejandro Vargas, is about the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr. Yet another, danced by Jeanette Delgado, treats the founding fathers like monsters from “Thriller.”

Exuberant and playful, nevertheless contextually perplexing, is “The Gentleman of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts,” in which Brandt Martinez performs Superman.

Up till now, “Illinoise” is pleasurable to the eye and ear, but quite a lot a dance live performance with no discernible by means of-line.

The show’s bigger objective clicks in — and so do we — when the wonderous Ubeda cracks open his character’s journal, having designed up the confidence to converse (or, you know, spin and plié), and remembers his complicated journey with childhood best mate Carl (Ben Cook dinner). 

Those people recollections of inseparability, unrequited really like, decline and extra decline are intestine-wrenching, in particular in the hanging selection “The Seer’s Tower,” sung angelically by Shara Nova.

Ubeda and Prepare dinner, who have respectively played Mister Mistoffelees in “Cats” and a Newsie on Broadway, among the other roles, are gorgeously expressive performers in their faces and movements as they weave involving just about every other and then achingly separate. 

Musical theater choreography is a differently great artwork, of course, but there is serious elation in observing excellent dancers like these get to do what they of course dream of doing. That enthusiasm radiates by means of this total cast and clearly show.

And Peck, whose only other Broadway display was 2018’s “Carousel,” strips absent any perceived pretension from dance. His creations are sleek and exact, devoid of a question, still also angsty, celebratory and enveloping when paired with the reverie of Stevens’ audio. 

Alternatively than experience like I’d absent to the ballet, I could have been at a yard bar in Bushwick, so a great deal flannel and saggy pants there were.

That is fantastic. The last point Broadway requirements is more of the identical.