‘Illinoise’ review: Moving Broadway show is about love, loss — and dance
26.04.2024 - 19:59
/ nypost.com
1 hour, 30 minutes, no intermission. The St.
James Theatre, 246 W. 44th St.“Illinoise,” which opened Thursday at the St.
James Theatre, is the closest Broadway may ever get to putting an indie movie onstage. A sad-then-uplifting hipster fantasy told mostly in entrancing dance, it’s like something out of Sundance — a tale of broken modern young people therapeutically coming to grips with their pasts together.And while my gut tells me the show — from New York City Ballet resident choreographer Justin Peck that’s set to the songs of Sufjan Stevens — is not really a musical per se, it is a transporting and soul-stirring experience all the same.A quartet of singers, stationed god-like on tall platforms above a painted plywood stage, perform Stevens’ 2005 album, a richly layered Midwestern time capsule, as they look down on the movers below.
Henry (Ricky Ubeda) has spontaneously left his New York apartment to go on an autumn hike, where he stumbles across 11 people around a campfire sharing trippy stories they’ve written. Whimsically, they carry glowing orbs, like Godzilla fireflies.The first half of “Illinoise” is made up of disparate episodic vignettes occasionally with structured plots, and never with any dialogue or character singing like you’d find in a typical musical.
For millennial readers, the format brings to mind the deep-in-the-woods young-adult horror series “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”One tale, led by the fabulous Alejandro Vargas, is about the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Another, danced by Jeanette Delgado, treats the Founding Fathers like monsters from “Thriller.”Exuberant and playful, though contextually confusing, is the section “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts,” in which Brandt Martinez plays
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