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.