Illinoise | Live Show Review – TOP 20 MUSICALS 2024: No 13

Linda Winer
Wednesday, November 27, 2024

It has been circling Broadway for nearly a year, selling out non-profit venues from Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory. Finally, Illinoise, the hypnotic 90-minute dance-driven spectacular based on Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 cult-classic album (‘Illinois’ without the ‘e’) arrived just a day under the wire of eligibility for the Tony Awards.

Is the show worth the breathless anticipation? Yes, often. Oddly enough, however, the least compelling element in the form known as a ‘dansical’ is the choreography itself. Justin Peck, a creative force at the
New York City Ballet and choreographer of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story film, has also directed and co-written the piece (with Pulitzer winner Jackie Sibblies Drury).

The result is a daring, elusive, total-theatre adaptation of Stevens’s coming-of-age, genre-shifting concept album. And the 12 dancers, none of whom speak, are all stupendous. But the busy movement – primarily repetitive half-circles of taut arms, legs, torsos – seldom has the originality of such gold-standard dansicals as Twyla Tharp’s 2002 Movin’ Out.

Innovation is nearly everywhere else. The band delivers Stevens’s soft-rock, harder-rock, country, folk and minimalist music from above, looking down on the three enchanting, ethereal singers wearing butterfly wings and grunge. The action travels from ‘middle of nowhere’ to Chicago to New York and back, identified by lights on an old billboard. Adam Rigg’s sets introduce many of the silent storytellers through personal journals around a campfire in a clearing of prairie grass with people holding magical globes of light – like fireflies or, no kidding, UFOs – and upside-down pine trees lurking from above.

At first, the show is an anthology of wildly different tales, initially gruesome. These include, or so the programme tells us, ‘a story about Jacksonville,’ a small town where Byron Tittle, as a dashing preacher man, does a ferocious tap seduction for a young woman. Horror stories pile up. In ‘a story about Zombies’, monsters in green masks wiggle their fingers and flex into backbends while a woman (the remarkable Jeanette Delgado) runs in place as if in a nightmare. ‘A story about John Wayne Gacy, Jr’ is inescapable danger in a clown-face chasing boys.

But don’t be scared away. Before long, Superman arrives in the formidable presence of Brandt Martinez, a reluctant, poignant man of steel with a cape made from a checkered tablecloth and powerful slashing turns that contradict his bewildered face.

Then the story turns abruptly and forever, for better and for worse, to Henry (Ricky Ubeda, amazing), the seeker whose love life dominates the rest of the show. Henry loves his best friend Carl (the charismatic, heart-tugging Ben Cook) but Carl loves his girlfriend (Gaby Diaz), who is diagnosed with cancer while the young men are driving from Chicago to New York. Road trip turns into guilt trip. Suddenly, the intentionally obscure, poetic mysteries become specific, obvious, even sentimental, including the dead girl on a slab and Carl getting lured to his death by the Zombies, who are back. Henry pulls himself apart with despair and confusion in a soul-lacerating solo, then mopes, then finds a guy who loves him back.

There are many false endings in many locations. The women are increasingly underutilised and we begin to be annoyed that they’re wearing sexy midriff-baring crop tops (costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung) while the guys look appealingly normal in flannels and sweat socks.

With Henry, we journey through fear of being left, of leaving, of loving too much/not enough. An insert in the theatre programme is a fantasy of Henry’s private journal, with text by Drury, and childlike, endearing scribbles and doodles by illustrator Joanna Neborsky. We can’t help wondering if the show itself is diminished by asking us to read the journal, which, admittingly, helps us to better understand what’s happening onstage. On the other hand, so do liner notes on a valuable, challenging album. Reservations aside, Broadway always expands with challenge.