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    ‘Illinoise,’ a Sufjan Stevens Dance Musical, Is Moving to Broadway

    The production will make its transfer unusually fast, with an opening set for April 24, just 29 days after it wraps up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory.“Illinoise,” a dance-driven, dialogue-free musical adapted from a much-loved 2005 album by Sufjan Stevens, will transfer to Broadway next month.The show, which is a collaboration between the celebrated choreographer Justin Peck and the Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, is to open on April 24 at the St. James Theater; the run is to be limited, with a scheduled closing date of Aug. 10.“Illinoise” depicts a group of young creative people gathered around a campfire to share stories about their lives; it ultimately focuses on the life of a man who is finding his way while confronting grief. “A lot of the show is really about the catharsis of opening up to the community around oneself,” Peck, who is directing and choreographing the show, said in an interview.“Illinoise” joins a crowded spring season on Broadway, which has a heavy concentration of openings in late April, posing significant economic challenges for producers because costs have risen and audience numbers have fallen since the coronavirus pandemic.But the creators and backers of “Illinoise” want to capitalize on their show’s momentum: It is just wrapping up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, and it also had successful runs earlier this year at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and last year at Bard College’s Fisher Center.The transfer will be unusually fast, with just 29 days between the end of the run at the Armory and the start of the run at the St. James. There will be a brief rehearsal period, but no previews; the first performance will also be the opening, which is uncommon for Broadway.“We have this kind of lightning in a bottle with this show that is not something that one can create intentionally,” Peck said. “We want to preserve the energy of the show, and the longer we wait between phases of this, the greater we risk losing what that energy is.”“Illinoise” is performed by a dozen acting dancers and a trio of vocalists, along with a live band.The show’s use of dance to drive a narrative is not unprecedented: The history of such so-called dansicals includes the Tony-winning “Contact,” which opened in 2000, as well as the 2002 production that most influenced Peck, “Movin’ Out,” which Twyla Tharp choreographed using the songs of Billy Joel.“The music and the story and the movement combine in your own mind, rather than being combined onstage in front of you,” Drury said in an interview. “And there’s something about that that feels really beautiful and exciting. It just allows the audience to really empathize and connect emotionally with what’s going on onstage.”The Broadway run is being produced by Orin Wolf, John Styles and David Binder, in association with Seaview. More

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    ‘Illinoise’: A Place of Overflowing Emotion, but Little Dance Spirit

    Justin Peck, who directs and choreographs a narrative dance musical to Sufjan Stevens’s concept album “Illinois,” resorts to his usual standby: community.“They trust themselves more than actors do,” Jerome Robbins once wrote of dancers. “Dancers know they will make it their own. Actors have the complication of wanting to make it their own, and their horror of exposing what their own is. Dancers always reveal themselves.”But the dancers in “Illinoise,” Justin Peck’s reimagining of Sufjan Stevens’s adventurous concept album “Illinois” (2005), are in a knotty situation. In the show, now at the Park Avenue Armory, the dancers are also the actors. And rarely does it feel like they are revealing facets of themselves — or showing the clarity that radiates through unaffected dancing.Instead their performances are a bizarre hybrid. They act out the dancing and dance out the acting. They struggle with both, partly because of their daunting task: Turning their very adult selves into younger selves on the cusp of adulthood. Even the dewier-looking ones have trouble. How could they not? Peck has them bouncing between giddiness and angst, with little in between.It’s hard to pin down what “Illinoise” wants to be, though it clearly has Broadway ambitions. Is it the musical theater version of a story ballet? A concert with dancing? Does it even care about dancing, really? The show, referred to as “A New Kind of Musical,” has little that seems new; it’s drowning in sentimentality, which is about as old school as it gets. And it doesn’t have much of a story, but what is there — by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury — is opaque. There’s no dialogue. It’s the music that is the undisputed star here.With new arrangements by the composer Timo Andres, and featuring three fine vocalists, the music carries the production, often leaving the dancers with little to do but mirror the lyrics. It’s exhausting to watch them sweat through this choreography. “Illinoise” is another attempt by Peck to build a community through dancing bodies, but the community is too delicate, too self absorbed for real connection.Ricky Ubeda, top, and Ahmad Simmons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: Welcome to ‘Illinoise,’ Land of Love, Grief and Zombies

    Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 concept album has become an unlikely and unforgettable dance-musical hybrid, directed and choreographed by Justin Peck.When emotions get too big for speech, you sing; when too big even for song, you dance.Or so goes the standard theatrical formula. But what if the emotions are huge from the get-go?That’s the challenge and, it turns out, the glory of “Illinoise,” a mysterious and deeply moving dance-musical hybrid based on Sufjan Stevens’s similarly named 2005 concept album. (The title has acquired an extra “e.”) Exploring the hot zone between childhood and adulthood, when emotions can be at their most overwhelming, the show dispenses with dialogue completely and leaps directly to movement and song.But not together: Among a thousand other smart choices, Justin Peck (who directed and choreographed) and Jackie Sibblies Drury (who, with Peck, wrote the story) have delaminated the songs from the characters, thus avoiding the jukebox trap that diminishes both.Instead, in the show, which opened on Thursday at the Park Avenue Armory, Stevens’s wistful and sometimes enigmatic numbers, set in various Illinois locations, are performed by three vocalists on platforms high above the action, wearing butterfly wings as if to stay aloft. Below, the 12 acting dancers (or are they dancing actors?) perform a parallel story without being forced into overliteral connections.Or rather, they perform an anthology of stories, a kind of exquisite corpse of late adolescence. As they collect around a clump of lanterns that suggest an urban campfire — the poetic set, including upside-down trees, is by Adam Rigg — they engage in what seems to be a rite of passage: the sharing of deep truths with sympathetic friends. The truths are often traumas, of course: first love, first loss, first disillusionment, first death. They are “read” (that is, danced) from notebooks decorated, again, with butterflies, suggesting the privacy of cocoons and the fragility of emergence.Twelve acting dancers (or are they dancing actors?) perform a story that’s parallel to the one told in Sufjan Stevens’s wistful songs set in various Illinois locations.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Why Is There No Oscar for Best Choreography?

    Imaginative dance abounds in Hollywood, but its creators remain unheralded at awards time.If you’ve watched this year’s Oscar-nominated films — actually, if you’ve been in a movie theater at all recently — you’ve almost certainly seen the work of a choreographer.Some of the most prominent dances have earned critical praise: Constanza Macras’s delightfully unhinged duet for “Poor Things.” Justin Peck’s ardent dream ballet for “Maestro.” Fatima Robinson’s showstopping love letters to Black social dance for “The Color Purple.” Jennifer White and Lisa Welham’s fizzily heroic numbers for “Barbie.”Other choreographers contributed in quieter, though no less essential, ways. Nobody would call the “Killers of the Flower Moon” fire scene — in which workers stoke a hellish blaze as part of an insurance fraud scheme — a dance number. But the choreographer Michael Arnold shaped the actors’ demonic movements for maximum biblical effect.Collectively, the films above earned 37 Oscar nominations. None of their choreographers will be honored, or likely even mentioned, at the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday.Why isn’t there an Oscar for best choreography? It’s a question people in the dance world have been asking for decades.And there’s no satisfying answer.Imaginative, world-expanding dance helped make Hollywood what it is, defining the movie musicals of its golden age. So many classic movies live and breathe through their dance numbers, marvels of choreographic wit and technical ingenuity. Today’s film choreographers also shape far more than steps, creating scenes that propel plot in ways that dialogue can’t. It makes sense that dance scenes frequently go viral: Good film choreography can capture, succinctly and with striking clarity, the essence of a character, relationship or problem.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    36 Hours in Austin: Things to Do and See

    9 a.m.
    Embrace Austin’s breakfast taco addiction
    Breakfast tacos are essential in Austin, and Veracruz All Natural is a top spot for them; the yummy smoothies are a gratifying bonus. The sisters Reyna and Maritza Vazquez opened their first Austin food trailer in 2008, and now there are seven Veracruz locations, including East Austin, South Austin and inside the Line hotel — visit whichever is closest. The meat is consistently tender and well seasoned, and the tortillas are pillowy. Try the popular migas taco, with fluffy eggs and avocado, or the (somewhat) healthier La Reyna, which is loaded with veggies. Pair with fresh juices like the Mr. Verde, a combo of celery, green apple, spinach and more, or smoothies like the Mexico Lindo, with lime juice and cantaloupe, for an ideal, all-in-one morning stop. Most tacos and smoothies cost around $5. More

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    In Justin Peck’s ‘Illinoise,’ Dance On and Feel It

    Justin Peck was around 17 when he first heard the Sufjan Stevens album “Illinois,” an epic paean to the state, nearly two dozen tracks brimming with orchestral indie rock, dense, lyrical wistfulness and sometimes obscure local history. This listening experience came long before Peck wanted to make dances, before he was even a professional dancer.But “Illinois” urged him to move. “It was an instantaneous, illuminating thing that I felt like it was so danceable,” said Peck, now the resident choreographer and artistic adviser at New York City Ballet. “And it is so rare to find someone who can conjure that, especially someone who’s alive right now.”Ever since, Peck, 36, has found artistic inspiration in Stevens — “the voice in music that has led me down paths further than I’ve ever gone before,” he said.The two collaborated regularly, including on “Year of the Rabbit,” the ballet that launched Peck as a choreographer, in 2012. Not long after they began working together, Peck, hoping to experiment with storytelling forms, and influenced by dance-pop productions like Twyla Tharp’s “Movin’ Out,” asked if he could make a theatrical piece set to “Illinois.” Stevens took nearly five years to agree.Justin Peck, left, and Jackie Sibblies Drury, who said the show “feels like the most broadly appealing thing that I have actually ever worked on.”Sasha Arutyunova for The New York TimesAlmost five years later, the result is “Illinoise,” a project that is every bit as ambitious and genre-defying as its soundtrack: a narrative dance musical that combines a coming-of-age story, a snapshot of queer identity and a meditation on death, love, community, history, politics and zombies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Reviving ‘The Wiz’ Through ‘the Blackest of Black Lenses’

    Schele Williams first saw “The Wiz” when a tour of the original Broadway production came through Dayton, Ohio. She was 7 years old, and recalled it being the most “beautiful reflection of Blackness that I had never seen.”Years later, she was cast as Dorothy in a high school production of “The Wiz,” and the thrill of that experience led Williams to pursue a career in musical theater. She even used the show’s soaring finale, “Home,” as one of her audition songs.Now, after working on Broadway as an actor (“Aida”) and an associate director (“Motown”), she is directing the first Broadway revival of “The Wiz” in almost 40 years. It’s a chance, Williams said, to celebrate what “The Wiz” has meant to her and to pass the story along to her daughters.Since becoming a Broadway hit in 1975, “The Wiz,” a gospel, soul and R&B take on Dorothy’s adventures in Oz, largely composed by Charlie Smalls, with a book by William F. Brown, has been a vibrant cornerstone of Black culture. The show blends Afrofuturism with classic Americana to enact a sort of creative reparation, reframing an allegory about perseverance and self-determination to feature Black characters who, in the ’70s, had rarely appeared in popular children’s stories.The 1978 Motown film adaptation, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, was a critical and box-office flop. But the movie has been a trippy favorite of family living rooms for multiple generations, and the musical has remained a staple on local stages around the country.“The weight of that is not lost on me,” said Williams.The new production of “The Wiz,” beginning previews on March 29 at the Marquis Theater, arrives in New York after a 13-city national tour that began in September. The creative team said its goal is to celebrate both the property’s legacy and the richness of Black American history and culture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jennifer Lopez and ‘This Is Me … Now’: Is She for Real?

    “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a movie built on her latest album, is a showcase for the exhausting, never-ending, hazardous work of being Jennifer Lopez.Nobody who winds up at a “what’s the strangest moment in this new J. Lo thingy” contest should worry. There are no wrong answers.The parts in which Fat Joe plays Dr. Melfi to Jennifer Lopez’s Tony Soprano bewilder as intensely as the too-many scenes in which Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah, Keke Palmer, Post Malone, Kim Petras and Neil deGrasse Tyson (to pick merely six of a dozen names) bickeringly represent the astrological signs. None of these people appears to have been on the set at the same time. The only performers persuasively sharing the screen are Jenifer Lewis and Jenifer Lewis, and that’s only because she’s doing Gemini.A number about a quickie wedding is called “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but the groom has already hand-delivered Lopez’s invitation. It’s “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but first with a stop at what could be Westeros or Themyscira or “The Cell.” Least forgettable is the sight of our star, in a tank top and up to her neck in elbow warmers, riding a headache ball to squelch a power-plant disaster.Lopez has titled these 53 minutes (and an additional 10-minute-plus credits sequence) “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story.” She’s released it, on Amazon, alongside an album of new songs, a few of which provide grist for the visual component. The album is a so-so buffet of sounds that get called contemporary or urban: music that could have been produced at any point in the last 25 years, which isn’t the same as calling it timeless. Lopez has been never on any sort of cutting edge. She’s often where music just was; and that can leave her stranded the way she is here.For “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” she gives “just was” both frenetic cinematic accompaniment and her physical all. In addition cowriting, Lopez goes out on a limb and takes the role of what can rightly be called “Me,” a husband-hunter jailed in such metaphorical music-video scenarios as “glass house” and “love factory.” In that second one, she and two dozen coveralled co-workers bang out some electrocuted, hydraulic choreography while the operation’s giant, once-malfunctioning heart sputters back to life and spews radioactive positivity. These are the only vaguely satisfying numbers. If the wishy-washy, parable-making and haywire everything else won’t cohere into true beauty or credible horror, then camp it is. Ladies and gentlemen: Jennifer Lopez and her Oppenheimer Dancers!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More