In the middle of June, a trio of Christmas trees hang upside down above a dimly lit stage at Bard College’s Fisher Center, north of New York City. Across the way a billboard proclaims “Welcome to Illinois.” Atop a wall of scaffolding, 13 musicians play the opening notes of “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts,” a highlight from Sufjan Stevens’ humbly monumental 2005 album Illinois, which casts a journey of self-discovery against a larger examination of American exceptionalism. Below the musicians, under a spotlight, a dancer clad in a Superman shirt, shorts, and sneakers performs a series of moves that evoke the Man of Steel’s trademark fist-forward flying position. Three other performers use a gingham picnic blanket to create a cape, moving their bodies as if they themselves were the fluttering wind. As the band charges toward the song’s chorus, nearly half-a-dozen dancers, all dressed in bright athletic gear, rush out from the wings and begin to bounce in unison.
In the aisle, silently bobbing in sync is Justin Peck, the director, choreographer, and co-writer at the center of this reimagination of Stevens’ beloved record. “Hold!” he suddenly announces, screeching everything to a halt. Peck hoists his lithe frame onstage and begins to offer slight adjustments, instructing one dancer to put more weight into their right foot. A harsh buzz reverberates through the room: a pair of green wings worn by vocalist Tasha Viets-VanLear has bumped into the microphone. Another voice chimes in: “I’m not sure we’ve sound checked the accordion.”
This is a tech rehearsal for the sold-out, seven-show run of Peck’s adaptation of Illinois that debuts tonight. It’s an unusual project that the acclaimed ballet dancer and choreographer can’t quite define himself. “I couldn’t tell you if it’s a concert or dance-theater piece or musical,” Peck admits. “It’s somewhere amidst all that but feels like its own thing.”
Along with winning a Tony Award for choreographing a 2018 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel and working on Stephen Spielberg’s 2021 adaptation of West Side Story, Peck has partnered with Stevens on a number of ballets over the last decade. “It’s the most important collaboration of my career so far,” Peck says. He was introduced to Illinois as a teenager and recalls “being moved on a very personal level” by the album while also quietly clocking a sense of rhythm that could translate towards dance.
Peck had long dreamed of developing a project based around Illinois and brought the idea up to Stevens every so often, but the musician repeatedly deflected the proposal. “After a certain amount of time, he realized that I wasn’t going to stop asking,” Peck explains. “Eventually, a few years ago, he said something along the lines of, ‘This album feels like a lifetime ago to me, so I don’t want to revisit it. But if you feel like there’s something here that you want to interpret, you have my blessing.’” (Stevens declined to be interviewed for this story.)
But where to begin? At 22 tracks, Illinois is a sprawling history lesson that includes references to the serial killer (and Chicago native) John Wayne Gacy, an obscure state holiday celebrating a Polish hero of the Revolutionary War, and a prophetic alien sighting. It’s equally ambitious musically, weaving together delicate folk narratives about blossoming queerness, orchestral anthems destined for cinematic montages, and jazz tunes about the state’s ghost towns.
The stage show’s music director Nathan Koci half-jokes that one challenge of the project “was how to do it without 15 oboe players.” Frequent Stevens collaborator Timo Andres, who handled the show’s musical arrangements, adds that though he wanted to remain faithful to the source material, “the intention was never to replicate the sound of the album so much as capture the spirit of it.”
It’s not difficult to imagine all of this dissolving into chaos, or worse—Broadway pizazz. “The one thing Sufjan said to me at the start of the process was: ‘This is not musical theater,’” says Andres. Luckily, as Peck’s co-writer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury recently clarified, there are “no John Wayne Gacy jazz hands” in the show. And, on a basic level, it’s thrilling to hear this album performed in its entirety by a firing-on-all-cylinders band that includes original Illinois vocalist Shara Nova, aka My Brightest Diamond.
To complement the music, Peck and Sibblies Drury devised an intimate narrative centered around a group of people sharing stories by a campfire, a choice that Peck describes as “an ode to theater’s origins and the oldest form of storytelling.” The production’s stage design is cozy and simple; among the few props are lanterns that cast a warm glow on the dancers’ faces. At one point in the process, Peck and Sibblies Drury considered adding dialogue before ultimately deciding against it. “Letting musicians actually just sing the songs and then having the choreography interact with it allows for other meanings of those lyrics to come to light, ones you might not have discovered when you were listening to it on your iPod Nano by yourself,” says Sibblies Drury.
“It can be easy to get caught up in the album’s ambition and historical references,” Peck adds. “But a big part of this for me has been locating the personal in it.” On the album, Peck hears the story of Stevens’ “coming of age and what it was like for him to find his place in the world and in his art, to find his community and feel like his most authentic version of himself.”
This theme of self-discovery is conveyed in the arc of a character in the show that grew in prominence as Peck and Sibblies Drury fleshed out a storyline. Henry—outfitted in a khaki outfit that recalls the scout uniform Stevens often wore during the Illinois era—spends the first part of the show reluctant to share his tale. Eventually, his story begins to unfurl like a silent film atop “Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!,” a banjo-driven song that explores Stevens’ family dynamic against a backdrop of Illinois lore.
Peck’s choreography translates the deep, playful friendship between Henry and Will, two young men danced by Ricky Ubeda and Ben Cook. Henry’s apparent unrequited love is soon complicated by a female character, performed with flirtatious naivete Gaby Diaz, who begins to attract Will’s attention. One of the scene’s final moments finds the trio dancing in sync, before Henry, ever so gradually, slips out of step. The character of Henry ultimately became so central to the show’s arc that Peck and Sibblies Drury were inspired to rearrange the album’s tracklist slightly to bind that narrative thread. “It felt important to try to make that young midwestern boy’s story really specific,” says Sibblies Drury.
For “Chicago,” the album’s anthemic centerpiece, Henry and Will embark on a road trip to you-know-where. As dancers form a human car with flashlights, a license plate, and a steering wheel, Tariq al-Sabir, a multi-hyphenate musician and Blood Orange collaborator, begins to sing, lending a deep, honeyed voice to Stevens’ autobiographical song about finding himself en route to the Windy City. The moment will no doubt be especially poignant when the show makes its Chicago debut early next year, before a planned international tour.
Peck and his collaborators are well-aware that their audience will have certain expectations or desires for this adaptation. “Not only does everyone love this album, they can tell me where they were when they first heard it, what they were going through, and how the album helped them understand themselves,” Peck says. “It’s an album that touched an entire generation.” This includes a majority of the people who worked on this production of Illinois, too. “I was dating my now-husband when I first listened to Illinois, and we played the CD in our U-Haul when we were literally moving to Chicago,” says Sibblies Drury. “This piece isn’t about me, but I know those emotions have found their way into it.”
