“Illinoise,” a hallucinatory dance musical based mostly on Sufjan Stevens’ 2005 notion album “Illinois,” gives a fitting stop to a Broadway season that appeared happiest when working past regular assumptions and practices.
Whether or not the piece — I wait to contact this fragile hybrid a clearly show — is additional dance than musical is not all that essential. Let the theater award groups stretch to accommodate new kinds and visions. The generation, which was at the Park Avenue Armory earlier this time, has arrived at the St. James Theatre in the job of deus ex machina, rescuing Broadway from its hidebound patterns.
All the aspects of a musical are to be found in “Illinoise.” The tunes, mixing indie people, alt rock and chamber pop, generates space for collective reflection. The lyrics — poetic shards that blur the line among the personalized and the historic, the symbolic and the idiosyncratic, the living and the lifeless — swirl from the recesses of inner everyday living. The choreography interprets this inside struggle into athletic grace.
Admittedly, the reserve by playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury and director and choreographer Justin Peck is much more of an evolving circumstance than a discernible drama. But the dreamlike manufacturing is thematically anchored. A compromise is struck involving the theater’s proclivity for tale and dance’s penchant for abstraction, allowing audience users to hook up narrative strands in their possess way.
Individually, I was relieved not to bear witness to one more pressured relationship involving script and score. When the ebook musical will work — as it does gloriously this year in the revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” — there’s absolutely nothing far more fulfilling. But for each Stephen Sondheim masterpiece there’s a barrage of jukebox and movie musicals keen to income in on the forgiving nostalgia of theatergoers.
“Illinoise” is conceived holistically. The work’s structure would seem to have organically arisen from artists responding to 1 a further, inspiration begetting inspiration. The end result, grounded in like, is route-clearing.
A few vocalists (Elijah Lyons, Shara Nova, Tasha Viets-VanLear), kitted out in street-artwork butterfly wings, are perched on platforms. Their stunning, otherworldly singing — accompanied by an orchestra elevated in other places on Adam Rigg’s urban scaffolding set — gives the songs a celestial breadth that extends past a one singer-songwriter consciousness.
I’m not intimately familiar with Stevens’ album, but I was caught up in the prayerlike sweep of tracks that shift over and above rational imagined. Phrases are dropped and indicating drifts, but the perception of emotional urgency, of a delayed yet inescapable self-reckoning, arrives by means of.
The 12-dancer enterprise is very individualized, distinct in existence and style of motion. Every single determine indicates a distinctive qualifications, but certain facets of remaining recur. The inherent issues of coming of age is shared in a piece that tracks the motion from innocence to encounter. Time, at any time afoot, helps make it difficult for any person to capture up. Nonetheless racing by means of existence can only carry on for so long.
Henry (Ricky Ubeda), a quirkily standard youthful male in shorts and a pink hat, looks to be on the operate from unpleasant recollections. He and his journal have occur to a clearing wherever some others have collected to share their tales. The campfire placing, demarcated with lanterns, suggests a help group. The phrase “circle of grief” was my have silent articulation for this communal stopping ground.
Other dancers hold illuminated orbs all around Henry, reminding him of his non secular presence. He is unwilling to spill his techniques, but it’s only a make any difference of time prior to he joins the many others in unburdening his soul.
Gaby Diaz and Ben Cook dinner in “Illinoise.”
(Liz Lauren)
The tales that precede his are choreographic enactments of track interpretations. The plan features titles that will cause this means for devotees of the album: “a tale about Jacksonville,” “a tale about Zombies,” “a story about John Wayne Gacy Jr.” and “a story about the Man of Metropolis.” These ethereal chronicles are about ancestry and belonging, the haunted household of American heritage, murder and guilt and the longing for a superhero well balanced in opposition to the luminous fact of susceptible humanity.
The imagery conjures a supernatural patchwork of revenants and Superman. The articles of these nightmares and obsessions does not often resonate. Sometimes the emotion is fey other moments the literalization of tune tips flirts with corniness. But the depth of the dancer’s relationship to the content speaks volumes.
It’s the act of catharsis, the exorcising of psychological demons, that tends to make “Illinoise” so gripping. Peck illustrates this system through the geometry of his staging. He has his dancers routinely split absent from their clustered configurations to seize a confessional instant right before reuniting in the embrace of the collective.
Henry’s tale entails to start with enjoy and the devastation of early loss. A few figures dominate his psychological landscape. Carl (Ben Cook dinner), Henry’s very best pal and initial love. Shelby (Gaby Diaz), a mutual good friend and Carl’s initially enjoy, who falls gravely sick. And Douglas (Ahmad Simmons), who sees and promises Henry’s grownup heart with an acceptance that can appear unusually and even alarmingly miraculous.
If Henry’s story have been elaborated in dialogue, it would have problems escaping sentimentality. But it’s the universal pattern, the way Henry’s working experience echoes our personal, that transcends the handling of particular plot details.
Ben Cook dinner, foreground, and Ricky Ubeda in “Illinoise.”
(Liz Lauren)
Peck, a prolific existence at New York City Ballet who choreographed dance sequences for Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film “West Side Tale,” hugs limited to the inner journey. His choreography embraces the inherent problems in remaining.
Simplicity in the earth, at the time missing, is difficult to get well. This popular tale is communicated in a dance vocabulary of determined strides overcoming invisible burdens. When moments of virtuosity explode, as take place when Bryon Tittle unleashes a breathtaking exhibit of Olympian faucet, the influence is a victory of spirit as significantly as it is of mortal flesh.
“Illinoise” becomes a street excursion, as Henry ventures to Chicago and then to New York, screening himself in massive-city landscapes that are included in Rigg’s scenic design. The visible image, sharply increased by the lights of Brandon Stirling Baker and the costumes of Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, indicates the sentimental education and learning of wandering artists looking to reassemble the losses and gains that are inextricably component of maturity.
This has not been a banner 12 months for new musicals on Broadway, but with “Illinoise,” the closing demonstrate I observed this season, I glimpsed the majestic potential.
