Illinoise is innovative and startlingly different from most theatrical fare. Derived from Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 concept album “Illinois,” this dance-theater piece, now at the Park Avenue Armory after runs at Bard Summerscape and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, takes a fairly cliched trope about romance and tells it with vigor and excitement featuring electric choreography by Justin Peck. The central love triangle is nothing new, but the brilliant staging and the sheer magnetism of the cast of dancer-actors and singer-musicians brings it to vital life.
The story, credited to Peck and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview) begins in the program found on the seats before the show starts. Like Broadway’s current The Notebook, the story starts with a hand-written narrative. Henry (an affecting Ricky Ubeda) writes of his childhood crush on the straight Carl (moody Ben Cook) who in turn is in love with their mutual friend Shelby (ethereal Gaby Diaz).
But before Henry’s story is developed and he meets his first adult love Douglas (charismatic Ahmad Simmons), several of Henry’s friends gather around a campfire to dance out their tales from their own journals. These vignettes include a rumination on African-American ancestry, a recasting of the founding fathers and other dead white male historical figures as menacing zombies and segments on serial killer John Wayne Gacy and the heroic myth of Superman.
Peck’s dazzling dances are accompanied by a lush full orchestra and heavenly vocals from keyboardist Elijah Lyons and electric guitarists Shara Nova and Tasha Viets-VanLear. Adam Rigg’s otherworldly set combines elements of sci-fi fantasy and small-town loneliness illuminated by Brandon Stirling Baker’s atmospheric lighting.
The separate dance pieces don’t really connect with each other or with most of the lyrics in Stevens’s fascinating songs, but the overall production intoxicates as do the dancers and singers. In addition to the already mentioned, Byron Tittle delivers a dynamite tap solo, and Rachel Lockhart, Jeanette Delgado, Alejandro Vargas, and Robbie Fairchild ably lead the segments before Henry’s central one. Too bad the story is the weakest link in an otherwise impressive dance-theater piece.
