Illinoise (4*)

Call Me By Your Name first brought DIY maestro Sufjan Stevens into my overstuffed pop-music consciousness with an appealing kind of wispiness that earned him an Academy Award nomination for "Mystery of Love."  His collaboration with choreographer Justin Peck at the Armory in March sounded intriguing enough to do some homework after purchasing tickets to Illinoise, now transferred to Broadway.  But after a couple of listens while reading the lyrics, his album of the same name, first released in 2005, left me baffled--a song about John Wayne Gacy, an infamous, gay serial killer?--and more than a little fearful that I'd be snoring shortly after the curtain came up.

Not to worry.  The excitement in the theater for the third preview performance--attended by a lot more 20somethings than you typically find at a matinee--was palpable.  Without being snarky, I'm tempted to call the deeply affecting production a woke version of Rent with the cornfields of Illinois substituting for  East Village tenements.  An energetic and charismatic cast of young dancers wordlessly performs the timeless rite of finding your tribe while a tip-top band with a trio of superb, butterflied vocalists spin the album and the various tales it shares.

Peck and book writer Jackie Sibblies Drury stage the highly impressionistic songs as consciousness raising sessions around a supportive campfire, some more easily interpreted than others.  But even without the narrative signposts provided in a faux extract from Henry's journal (distributed with the Playbill),  anyone who ever has left a small town behind for the big city will be swept along by their unique artistic conceit lit by fireflies & UFOs.  Henry's story, likely inspired by Stevens's own journey, includes a lovely sequence illustrating the ambiguity of youthful sexuality.  It also imbues the show with a dramatic arc that edges toward the unnecessarily maudlin even as it captures sturm und drang we're most likely to experience at his age.

In fact, that's what the show's lack of specificity does best:  Illinoise gives you a theatrical environment to color with your own metamorphosis.  We are all butterflies!