Ubeda, Ricky

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    Enhancing Broadway, by Any Bodily Means Necessary

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    The choreographers nominated for Tony Awards this year have a broader vision than usual of the possibilities of dance in theater.In the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Outsiders,” something shocking keeps happening. It isn’t that the characters throw punches, or not exactly. These are teenagers who rumble, so it isn’t surprising that they’re violent. What’s shocking is the kinesthetic impact. You seem to feel the blows yourself.The impact is electrifying, but it doesn’t operate alone. It serves the storytelling and engages the emotions of an audience by bodily means. This is what choreography at its best can do, and it isn’t limited to what you might think of as dancing.The choreographers of “The Outsiders” and of the four other shows nominated for the Tony Award in that category this year understand this. None dole out the usual stuff. This broader vision of theatrical choreography is worth noticing and applauding.Hell’s KitchenMaleah Joi Moon plays the lead role in “Hell’s Kitchen,” which has choreography by Camille A. Brown.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA loosely autobiographical jukebox musical of songs by Alicia Keys, “Hell’s Kitchen” takes place in the 1990s, in the Manhattan neighborhood of the title. Camille A. Brown’s choreography fits the setting. It looks, delightfully, like dancing that the people who live there would do, like regular folks getting their groove on.But it’s also a throwback to an older, neglected mode of integrating dance into a musical, the tradition that Agnes de Mille inaugurated with shows like “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel” in the 1940s. Like de Mille, Brown individuates the ensemble with detail: This guy is extra flamboyant; that gal pops her gum bubbles on the beat. Moving like this, the dancing chorus becomes the appealing community that draws the show’s 17-year-old protagonist, Ali, into the world — and out from the apartment building where her mother wants her to stay sheltered.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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      ‘Illinoise’: A Place of Overflowing Emotion, but Little Dance Spirit

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      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

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      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