By now, there’s already been much buzz surrounding Illinoise, the stage musical/dance performance based on Sufjan Stevens’s hallowed album Illinois. Since its premiere at Bard College in New York last spring, reviews for the production have been unanimously rhapsodic. After Bard, Illinoise traveled to Chicago’s Shakespeare Theater, the Park Avenue Armory, and finally to Broadway, where it opens tonight at the St. James Theatre—just in time to be eligible for the 2024 Tony Awards.
Upon its 2005 release, Stevens’s 26-song concept album immediately imprinted on the generation who gobbled it up. An ode to the state of Illinois, Stevens weaves historical figures, tragedies, and hyper-regional IYKYKs into an album that swells with plush marching-band riffs and then quiets down to homespun banjo strums. But for all its locale narratives, the album had mass appeal. It gave listeners the sense of being lost and found again, and who can’t relate to that?
Justin Peck—who directed and choreographed the production and cowrote the book with Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury—was about 17 when he first listened to the album, and there was no going back. (In the Illinoise pamphlet, you’ll find an essay from Jessica Dessner, an artist, writer, former dancer, and close associate of Stevens who recalls a Facebook message she received from Peck more than a decade ago expressing his desire to meet with Stevens.) Peck’s profound appreciation for Stevens has resulted in several direct collaborations at the New York City Ballet (where Peck is a resident choreographer), which began with a composition for the ballet Year of the Rabbit in 2012.
Illinoise marks Peck and Stevens’s seventh collaboration, but it took Stevens five years to agree to it, and though he’s given it his blessing, the fiercely private musician has not been directly involved as no new music was required by the production. Instead, songs, as they appear on the Illinois album, unfurl in sequence, performed live with an orchestra and a trio of vocalists (Elijah Lyons, Tasha Viets-VanLear, and Shara Nova, who was featured on the original Illinois album). With each song, a new story is told not with words but dance choreography, overarchingly led by protagonist Ricky Ubeda. With Peck’s choreography—tender, organic, and at times appearing unchoreographed, as though you’re catching a performer’s jerk-reaction happy dance—along with the storyline, Illinoise tells of coming of age, feeling comfortable in your skin, first loves, first losses, and of course, the 1970s Chicago-based serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jr.
Ahead of the show’s transfer to Broadway, Vogue caught up with Peck and Drury to discuss their reactions to the show’s feedback and its future.
Vogue: First of all, let’s confirm something: Is your production pronounced “Ill-i-noise” with a hard s? Or like the state?
Justin Peck: I do “Illinoise” [hard s] 75% of the time, and then I revert back to “Illinois.” I guess, officially, it would be “Illinoise.”
Will there be any changes with the show’s transfer to Broadway’s St James Theatre, or is the production faithful to what you’ve staged in the past?
Peck: It is making the shift to Broadway, which we’re really excited about, but it’s really the production that we’ve created and designed that was presented at the Armory that is just moving into a Broadway run. There are always a couple of little things we might tweak, but the only difference really will be how it adapts to the theatrical setting of St. James Theatre, which we’re really thrilled about because it’s a great fit, as far as Broadway theaters go, for this show. The show will become even more energetic and vivid by putting it inside a more contained theater location. There’s a chance for this show to be felt more, not only in regards to the performances onstage but felt in terms of the audience experience—taking in something collectively with your neighbor next to you and being able to feed off of the energy of the crowd as well as the performers onstage. I think it’s actually going to be the most vivid version of the show yet.
Tell me about these tweaks. How has the show adapted to its previous various settings?
Peck: The first production we did at Bard Fisher Center was really just a chance to get a version of the show up and look at it and think, Okay, we get what this world is, what the language is, and what the broad strokes of it are. The work that followed was really about refining the storytelling and getting more clear on the narrative and the arcs of the characters that run through this world. The other thing that we really poured our energy and resources into was designing the space so that it felt like the musicians in the band were more and more present.
We’ve done a few versions of the set design, and with each pass, it brings the musicians further down and into the space in an architectural way, so it honors the experience of the album as well—that the musicians actually become a part of the energy in the space. We don’t have any musicians in a pit or hidden backstage somewhere, which a lot of Broadway shows do. We wanted to really prioritize the experience of the music as delivered by these extraordinary musicians. But because it’s a major dance musical, their real estate has to be prioritized: The deck has to have space for the staging to take place, and so it’s been this kind of Rubik’s Cube to evolve the visual and scenic design to accomplish all these things.
Jackie Sibblies Drury: If you went to see the show at Bard and then came to see it at St. James, you wouldn’t necessarily be like, “Oh, that’s different.” There’s been a thousand and one particular incremental changes that hopefully help the show hang together better. Justin’s done a lot of work to clarify the narrative arc of the dance aspect of the show. It’s been this experience for everyone working on the show: watching it, understanding it, and having the show grow and deepen.
Was Broadway the plan all along? Or was this a happy surprise?
Peck: We didn’t know until after the show opened at the Armory that it would make the jump. It was a real planets-aligning scenario, where the owners of the St. James Theatre came to see the show at the Armory very early on. They shared how much they loved it and said, “There’s an opportunity here with this theater,” because one of the shows before us was planning to close already. We seized the chance to make the shift, knowing that the sooner we could make that transfer, the better chance we had of preserving this cast. It was a high priority to maintain and keep the cast together.
Has anyone in the audience tried to dance? Sitting in the theater at the Park Avenue Armory, I was waiting for my cue to get up and dance.
Drury: At one performance in Chicago, the people next to me were dancing, but they might’ve been under the influence of something. It was really fun to watch the show next to them. It made me think: Are there ways to make the audience feel more comfortable and able to respond to the music? Hopefully, in that Broadway theater space, people will feel the other audience members’ presence more. So hopefully that will add to a little shoulder shrug, a little clap.
Peck: There are fans who do the 11-count clap that happens in [Stevens’ song] “The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders (Part I: The Great Frontier — Part II: Come to Me Only with Playthings Now).” That’s always fun when, like, half the audience starts doing that because you’re like, “Wow, they must really know the music because it’s such an odd time signature to clap to.” It’s part of what’s interesting about the show—it lives in some space between concert and theater musical and dance. I do feel like in a concert setting, people would be up and moving and grooving, and I’m all for that.
Has your own reaction to the show evolved over its run? With greater familiarity, are you able to pick up on nuances you might have originally missed?
Drury: More than some shows, it feels like a really live show. And so there are aspects of it that change every night. There are ways that the performers use their bodies and changes in how the singers embody the lyrics. The last time that I saw the show, one of the swings was on and getting the chance to watch him perform a role that I hadn’t seen him do onstage before brought tears to my eyes. I could see Justin’s choreography in a different way because there was a different body using it differently.
Peck: It does really exist in the moment, which is such a theater thing. But this show is especially special because of the delivery of this music and the ephemeral nature of dance performance. When you’re in the room watching it, it feels like you’re witnessing something very special.
People hold this album close to their hearts. What feedback have you received from the audience?
Peck: Honestly, that’s been the most incredible part of this journey: the messages, the personal notes, and the audible reactions I’ve received from fans and total strangers. Generally, the thing that I find really interesting is that they talk more about how the show made them feel as opposed to looking at the show in a cerebral way. It was more about how they could take it and interact with it on an emotional level. No one can ever be in control of creating something that does that to someone—it’s either there or it’s not.
I had one really cool experience recently: Our main electrician, this guy, Jimmy, who’s super old-school—like third generation working in the Broadway business, thick New York accent—came to see it at the Armory, and he was talking to me and a few other people in the elevator. I don’t think he even realized that I was the director, and he was like, “I’m not really into dancing stuff on Broadway, and then I got sucked into it, and I was so moved I started to cry—it really made me feel so many things.” That was very moving for me to hear.
Something else fun to witness was that the Armory run was sold out, and there would be a line that would form hours before every show, just in hopes of a cancellation ticket—and it was all young people. I used to be someone who would stand in those kinds of lines, and I never thought that I would actually be part of something that generated that kind of response.
Drury: I do feel like a lot of people didn’t think this was gonna be their cup of tea, but then they found themselves weeping. It’s amazing.
What has been the reaction of Sufjans Stevens’s fans specifically? I’m sure they make up a large part of the audience.
Peck: The album has meant a lot to the queer community for a long time. So there’s been a lot of people who come from that community, who love the music and are seeing it brought to life in this way. They’ve shared some pretty amazing responses. I get a lot of messages from people on Instagram, and I try to screenshot them because I don’t want to forget them. It’s started to build into an extensive collection of messages, almost like a scrapbook. I think we felt there was a big responsibility. It’s not something we took lightly.
Drury: I was obsessed with Rent when I was a teenager, and there was something about obsessively listening to the cast recording and then getting to go and see it on Broadway, knowing all those songs. That experience blew my tiny little mind. With Illinois, those songs mean so much to so many people. They’ve listened to it countless times with headphones in private. And so there’s something that feels so amazing to take that super-personal relationship and explode it inside of a theater. There’s something about that that, to me, feels like church.
Given all the feedback and praise from the press, is there any part of Illinoise or your roles in the show that you feel has been overlooked?
Drury: I’m surprised that more people haven’t talked about “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!” duet just because I think it’s a really beautiful piece of art that allows these two men to treat each other with such love and tenderness in a way that I feel like I don’t get to see very often. I’m surprised that the radical beauty of that scene hasn’t been a topic of more discussion.
Peck: On a personal note, there’s something about the press thinking that I come from New York City Ballet because I work a lot there and have a residency there. What a lot of people don’t realize is that I really am a theater kid who found my way to ballet from seeing a lot of theater as a young person. That was my first real exposure to the arts, storytelling, and dance. I grew up going to Broadway and some off-Broadway shows, and the ones that really inspired me would push the envelope a little bit—the outlier shows of a season.
Illinoise is really a tribute to that—it pulls so much from that deep history of the mine and also the inspiration I was able to carry forward and that utilizes my own skills as a maker. It’s really a love letter to theater even though it’s a little bit difficult to categorize the show. But at the end of the day, it’s our contribution to expanding what theater could be too.
