An iconic road trip album has made for an iconically unconventional Broadway show. Illinois, the esoteric 2005 album by singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, has been transformed into Illinoise, a four-time Tony-nominated Broadway hit unlike any other show this season. Directed by New York City Ballet choreographer and artistic adviser Justin Peck and orchestrated and arranged by Timo Andres, Illinoise takes Stevens’s 26-song concept album and turns it into a theatrical event that pushes the boundaries of musical theater, telling an epic tale about love, loss, coming of age, self-discovery, and storytelling without any spoken dialogue. On Friday, things come full circle with the release of the original Broadway cast recording of Illinoise (Nonesuch Records), almost 20 years after Stevens original album.
“I often have the thought of, Wow, if someone described this to me, I would be like, no, thanks. Not for me,” Andres told Vanity Fair over the phone. “Yet you see it and it’s like, somehow all the elements just kind of work together.”
Despite his initial skepticism, the recording of Illinoise wouldn’t have happened without Andres, who was selected by Stevens to orchestrate and arrange his music for the production. A pianist, classical music composer, and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Andres was, perhaps, not the obvious pick to turn an indie rock album into commercial theater. “I have no experience in commercial music of any kind,” says Andres. “I never work with music that’s expected to make any money whatsoever.” In hindsight, Andres thinks his lack of familiarity is why he was brought onboard in the first place. “[Stevens] didn’t want it to sound like a Broadway musical. He didn’t want it to be your typical Broadway pit band—that would’ve been ridiculous for his music.”
For Peck, Andres was the top choice to bring Illinoise to the stage. “Timo was a mutually agreed-upon collaborator that Sufjan and I thought, This person is the person who needs to do it,” he says. “The three of us have actually worked together on projects, so we all were familiar with one another. And I love Timo and his work, and he’s a great composer in his own right too. The process with him was going deeper with the arrangements and the orchestrations in support of the storytelling. It always comes back to the storytelling and how we can bend some of this music to better serve that.”
Andres credits his “inexperience and greenness” with adapting and arranging Stevens’s seminal album for Illinoise’s 14-piece onstage band. “We wanted [audiences] to feel like they’d just heard a great Sufjan Stevens show,” says Andres. “And it’s like, maybe Sufjan wasn’t singing in it, but they don’t mind because the singers we have are so good. And they don’t try to sound like Sufjan, they make it their own.” Luckily, Andres was able to enlist three stellar vocalists in Elijah Lyons, Tasha Viets-VanLear, and Shara Nova, who provided background vocals on the original album. “She’s kind of like the fairy godmother of the show,” says Peck.
Part of Andres’s bending of Stevens’s original album involved writing new music. But staying true to the source material was important to Andres. “All of the ‘new music’—these transitional dance arrangements—is stitched together from bits and pieces of music from elsewhere in the show,” he says. For example, Illinoise’s opening instrumental number is comprised of material from three different songs on the album. “This pulse that you hear in the very beginning of the show is the same pulse on the same note as the pulse that you hear in the very end of the show,” Andres says. “Even if it’s a type of thing that you might not notice until the third or fourth time you see the show, it’s like, Oh yeah, that repeated E, that comes back. That’s the first thing we hear, and the last thing we hear.” It’s this attention to detail and storytelling that has landed Andres a Tony nomination for best orchestrations.
The whirlwind experience has shifted the way Andres might approach his work going forward. “Maybe we should all be working a little harder to square that relationship between artists and audience. Maybe we should be thinking about that harder. Maybe we should be revising more. Maybe a little commercial pressure is a good thing.”
For a commercial enterprise, Illinoise isn’t anything like a traditional musical. Over the phone, Peck tells me how he and Illinoise cocreator and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury initially made the decision to remove spoken word from the show. “We both felt very strongly that the show exists in the expression of the music—and no dialogue,” Peck says. “It’s a very dance-forward show, but it’s really intended to be taken in as a theatrical piece.”
Since its premiere last summer at Bard College, Illinoise has been the talk of the theater community, with celebrated, sold-out runs at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the Park Avenue Armory. By the end of its buzzy run at the Armory, it was clear that Illinoise’s next stop was Broadway—and fast.
The production only had a few weeks to transfer the off-Broadway Armory production, which closed on March 26, to Broadway for an April 24 opening night. “There’s definitely advantages and disadvantages to that,” says Peck of the quick turnaround. But luckily for everyone involved, Illinoise quite literally couldn’t have found a better Broadway venue in the St. James Theatre, previously home to Disney’s Frozen and the Broadway revival of Into The Woods. “Well, it’s always a challenge with a dance-driven show to navigate space, right?” says Peck. “Dance exists spatially and the energy of dance can be very big at times. And yet the show also requires, I feel, a sense of intimacy in how it engages with the audience. The St. James was the best balance of that.”
From the jump, both Andres and Peck knew that Stevens wouldn’t be directly involved with Illinoise—because of how far removed he is from this chapter of his life. “It’s music that’s 20 years old that he hasn’t toured in a long time. It’s almost like from the perspective of a different person,” says Andres. “He is such a protean artist, he’s so productive and he’s constantly reinventing himself and doing so many different things. He does not dwell on the past. He doesn’t dwell on his past work.”
The present hasn’t been easy for Stevens. In September 2023, Stevens revealed that he had been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that left him hospitalized and unable to walk. The next month, Stevens released his 10th studio album, Javelin, dedicating it to his beloved partner and best friend, Evans Richardson, who died in April of that same year.
“He has not been able to be present as much as he would’ve liked just because of all that’s going on in his personal life right now,” says Peck. “It’s just been a very, very difficult year for him.” Still, Stevens made it to the St. James to see one of the final dress rehearsals before Illinoise opened on Broadway. “I was quite nervous,” Peck says. But he had no reason to worry, as Stevens was “super supportive” of the production. “I think he really appreciated the craft of it and the care and the quality of, especially, the music performances,” Peck explains. “It was fun to hear him talk about it. He was like, ‘Did I really write those lyrics?’ I think it’s such a blast from the past for him.”
Andres shared a similar sentiment. “I had the sense when I was talking to him a bit afterwards that [Stevens] was like, wow, I can’t believe what you guys made with this weird old music of mine. I had the sense he was a little bit…almost overwhelmed by hearing all this music again.”
In a difficult year for Stevens, Peck and Andres hope that their reincarnation of Illinoise provides something of a bright spot for the artist. “I was really glad he got to see it,” says Andres. “It had felt during the process like, Oh, there’s this sort of ghostly presence that is missing here. And it felt like, in a way, coming full circle and getting to close that loop.”
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