Illinoise

A lovely, if somewhat overlong, dance revue about humans telling stories and being oh-so-human, Illinoise is based on the beautiful songs of Sufjan Stevens and an original story by choreographer Justin Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury. The singers, musicians, and dancers are nearly all wonderful, and watching the show often feels like being bathed in warm bath of emotion. 

The content of the various episodes is not always clear. The billboard/screen that is part of the scenery is wasted most of the time; it could  be announcing the names of the various songs/stories. Parts of the show take place on the stage floor and cannot be seen clearly by much of the audience. As a result, the people in one row must move their heads to see past the people in front of them, and then the people in back of them must move their heads, and then the people in back of them must move their heads, and so on. From row G, seat 13, it felt like I was part of klutzy choreography that blocked and distracted from the actual dancing on stage.

However, whatever its weaknesses, Illinoise is a unique theatrical experience that is well worth seeing.

Wendy Caster

Carousel

Among the many ways Rodgers and Hammerstein helped innovate the American stage musical was through depth of character. Their musicals, after all, featured some particularly memorable ones, many of them women, with nuanced inner lives that they expressed to audiences through increasingly sophisticated song, dance, and dialogue. The anxious Laurie manipulated her suitors and then had psychosexual nightmares about them in the form of a lengthy, absorbing, and downright creepy ballet. Nellie Forbush casually tossed off some lame excuses about her own racism, but then struggled to overcome it so that she could live happily ever after with Emile DeBecque. Maria, a terrible nun with no direction in her life, slowly realized her potential as a governess, music educator, mom, and Nazi-evader once she ended up getting saddled with a bunch of neglected, unruly kids.

But depth of character somehow evades poor Julie Jordan, which is a problem because her paramour, Billy Bigelow, is a hot mess who also just happens to be endlessly fascinating: smarter, deeper, and more philosophical than he seems at the outset, with a restless mean streak and oceans of bitter agita beneath his easy charm. Bigelow is fire and brimstone; Jordan is merely a "queer one" (not remotely in the contemporary sense of the word), at least as she's described by her way better-developed and more interesting friend, Carrie Pipperidge. I've long struggled with Carousel in this particular respect, because the imbalance disrupts a show that might otherwise be perfect: dazzling to look at, ravishing to listen to, so far ahead of its time in particular ways, so extraordinarily weird as a piece.

The dark midcentury musical adaptation of an even darker early-20th-century play (Liliom by Ferenc Molnar), Carousel touches on themes that certainly weren't considered musical theater-fodder at the time, and that still come off as reasonably edgy today: "Hey, Oscar! How about we adapt that Hungarian flop into a musical about America's cruel and random class system, maybe with a side-serving of spiritual nihilism?" "I like what I'm hearing, Richard. But can there be a botched robbery that becomes a messy suicide and some domestic abuse? Also--stay with me--a clambake? If so, you got yourself a deal!"