What Chicago Stages Add to Illinoise, Little Shop and Omar

• Illinoise pairs Sufjan Stevens's songs with a new story told through dance.

• Little Shop of Horrors divides Audrey II between a singer and a puppeteer.

• Omar adds music and staging to a real person's testimony, while Chicago Reads Omar invites audiences to read his account themselves.

An album, a horror film and an enslaved scholar's autobiography are the starting points for three productions on Chicago's calendar. Lyric presents Omar on October 23, 25 and 28, 2026. Porchlight's Little Shop of Horrors follows in November and December. Illinoise returns to Chicago Shakespeare Theater in February 2027.

All three adapt existing work, but their freedom to invent differs. An album leaves room for a new dramatic story. A film can become a musical with a different setting and ending. An autobiography carries the words of a person whose life the adaptation asks us to understand.

The interest lies in those decisions. What do the creators keep? What do they change? And what can a group of live performers do that the original work could not?

Illinoise runs from February 9 to March 14, 2027, at The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Sufjan Stevens wrote the music and lyrics for the album Illinois. Justin Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury wrote the stage work's story, with Peck directing and choreographing.

Peck discussed the adaptation in an interview reproduced in the theater's 2024 program. After years of conversation, he developed the project with Stevens's permission. He could not fit the whole album into a single narrative, so he focused on a young person's departure from home and search for community.

An album can move among places, historical references and private experiences without asking one character to connect them. Peck and Drury's story gives the songs a particular sequence of people and relationships. That choice narrows the album's possibilities, but it also gives an audience a dramatic thread to follow.

Dance adds something else. While a song carries its words and music, a dancer can move toward another person, pull away or remain still. Those actions can support what we hear or make us reconsider it. The songs need not change for our understanding of them to shift.

That makes the return engagement worth approaching as a work with its own authors. Familiarity with Stevens's album supplies one way in; the story and choreography give listeners something new to follow.

Porchlight stages Little Shop of Horrors at the Biograph Theater from November 4 to December 13, 2026, as part of its 2026 and 2027 season. Its central creature, Audrey II, will be voiced by Juwon Tyrel Perry and operated by puppeteer Josh Bernaski, according to the cast credits.

The musical had already changed substantially from Roger Corman's 1960 film before reaching this production. Music Theatre International describes how Howard Ashman and Alan Menken moved the setting from Los Angeles to New York, reduced the cast of characters and changed the ending. Menken drew on early 1960s styles, including rock and roll and doo-wop, to give the story its musical character.

Onstage, Audrey II depends on two people making one creature convincing. Perry supplies the voice; Bernaski supplies its movement. Their timing has to connect what the plant sings with what the audience sees.

That is part of the pleasure of a theatrical monster. We know that people are creating the illusion, yet the voice and physical presence can persuade us to accept a single character. The puppet's movements and the singer's phrasing become parts of the same performance.

The cast announcement cannot tell us how well that partnership will work. It does tell us where a central challenge of this production lies: in the coordination between the person we hear and the creature we watch.

Omar ibn Said wrote his autobiography in Arabic in 1831 while enslaved in North Carolina. The Library of Congress places the manuscript within a life marked by capture, imprisonment and continued enslavement.

An opera based on that account has a responsibility beyond preserving a recognizable plot. Omar left his own words. Music, dialogue and staging inevitably shape how an audience encounters them, so the difference between his testimony and a later interpretation matters.

Director Kaneza Schaal describes one way Lyric's production brings written records onto the stage in her October 5 director's note. Performers will wear fabrics carrying Omar's writing alongside documents of enslavement, including ship manifests and records of sales. His words appear in relation to records through which other people exercised power over lives like his.

The opera has its own writers. Rhiannon Giddens wrote the libretto, and she and Michael Abels composed the music. Their work interprets Omar's life for the stage; it cannot stand in for everything he chose to record himself.

Lyric's Chicago Reads Omar initiative offers a way to keep both in view. It begins with the autobiography, then moves to a preservation video and material about the opera. Audiences can read Omar before encountering the theatrical work.

Reading alongside listening makes it possible to ask what the adaptation emphasizes, adds or leaves out. It also gives Omar a voice beyond the version of his life that appears in the opera.

These works suggest that fidelity has more than one meaning. Illinoise can keep Stevens's songs while building a story around them. Little Shop can preserve a film's premise while changing its setting, ending and sound. Omar must contend with the difference between dramatic invention and a real person's testimony.

For an audience, the question is less whether every detail survives than what a change makes possible, and what it might obscure. A dancer, a singing puppet and a costume covered in writing each offer a specific place to begin looking.