In a gorgeous staging at the Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, director & choreographer Justin Peck delivers a vibrant interpretation of Sufjan Stevens’ celebrated 2005 Illinois album via dance, live band performance and a dialogue-free story by Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury. On a set dominated by a huge freeway billboard with changing projections and musicians on scaffolding that evokes rusted El tracks, the vignettes play out, one per song (until the climactic last tale), with the framing device of a group sharing creative writing stories around a campfire. As the pantomimes give way to lush dance numbers interpreting the XRT-friendly folk-pop numbers, the show captivates.
As Amanda Petrusich so aptly summed up the album in her 9.2 Pitchfork review, “Stevens has always been a folk singer more in theory than in practice. He routinely ditches folk’s scrappy, stripped-down aesthetics, but consistently embraces its stories-of-the-people unanimity. Consequently, Illinois is less about place than spirit. Stevens dutifully celebrates and indicts all the appropriate landmarks, isolating the highest and lowest points in Illinois history, but at its best, the album makes America feel very small and very real: A boy crying in a van, a girl with bone cancer, stepmothers, parades, bandstands, presidents, UFOs, cream of wheat, trains after dark, a serial killer, Bible study. Musically, Illinois is strange and lush, as excessive and challenging as its giant, gushing song titles.”
It’s a lot for an album, but it feels just about right for this type of staging. A melancholy mood undercuts the colorful set and hypnotic choreography as the story turns to John Wayne Gacy’s victims, terminal cancer and suicide. Heavy themes, but the beautiful, haunting, swelling lyrics of “Chicago,” played twice here, offers bittersweet, anthemic comfort with its chorus of “All things go,” but also, “All things grow.”
Illinoise is a powerful night at the theater. By all means, go.
Illinoise runs through February 18 at the Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Liz Lauren
