Justin Peck interview: ‘Illinoise’ director and choreographer
“I just remember listening to it for the first time and being blown away by just the scale of it, the storytelling that exists inside of it and the ambition of it,” recalls Justin Peck of the first time he listened to the album “Illinois” by Sufjan Stevens. He was not yet a professional theater artist, but the seminal body of music left an impact. “I remember thinking, there’s something in all this. There’s a kind of theatrical event to pull out of this music. And I didn’t know what that meant,” he explains. Peck has come full circle to realizing his dream for the piece, having directed and choreographed the Broadway production of “Illinoise,” with a Tony nomination to boot. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
Adapting Steven’s poetic and expansive music for the stage was no simple feat. Peck was determined to use the entire album in the show, and to find a satisfying narrative device that could hold the density of the musician’s storytelling. So the choreographer and playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (who helped construct the book) set out “to blaze a trail through this music and find a kind of satisfying arc that could work with these songs, with this storytelling,” explains Peck.
SEE Tony Talk: What will win Best Musical?
The framing device they settled on was a campfire, where friends would gather to share personal stories. “It allows us to explore both short form storytelling and long form storytelling,” notes Peck. It’s a handy structure that allows for tangents about zombies and Superman, while also telling the larger story of Henry (Ricky Ubeda) on a journey of love and loss. “The thing about campfires is that it’s this kind of broadly felt human experience,” says the choreographer, “it’s this communal thing and this experience that has its own sort of theatrical effect to it in its own right.”
Peck built the show in collaboration with an ensemble of dancers of whom he is intimately familiar when it comes to their performance skills. That shared history made it easy to set a specific movement language to each performer, which would help define their character in the absence of dialogue. In the case of Ubeda’s Henry, that meant a healthy dose of earnestness and anguish. “There’s a lot of held-trauma in the body because what he explores through his storytelling has to do with the loss of a couple very close people to him,” explains Peck.
The entrancing choreography is ultimately a result of being inspired by the specific artists he enlisted to tell this story, and “being motivated to create a musical for dancer/actor storytellers to kind of thrive within,” says Peck. This style of show is not common for Broadway. “Dance musicals are not an every year thing. There may be an every few years kind of thing,” he admits, “And those are the kinds of shows that really inspired me as a young person. So in a way, this feels like my own love letter to the musical theater form and what I can bring to it.”
