Review: It Was 57 Years Ago Today

“Pepperland,” Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, May 16 – 18, 2025

May 18, 2025 | By Bruce R. Feldman

In Brief: With puckish choreography, appealing dancing, evocative costumes, and superb live accompaniment, the Mark Morris dancers presented an impressive series of variations – energetic or thoughtful – on songs from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

When the lights come up on Pepperland, the 17 members of the Mark Morris Dance Group are tightly clustered in a circle at the rear of the stage. The dancers slowly uncoil – arms stretched out to welcome the audience – and spread out on the stage.

With this small gesture Morris invites the audience into his world, setting the tone for his animated celebration of The Beatles and their important 1967 concept album.

The first thing we notice are the clothes the dancers are wearing – brightly colored slim mod suits with high notched lapels, miniskirts and minidresses in bold geometric prints, all made popular by British rockers and models in the Swinging Sixties.

The first thing we hear are notes of the album’s opening cut, performed by an eight-piece chamber ensemble led by the Pepperland’s composer, Ethan Iverson.

Morris isn’t setting choreography to existing tracks. This isn’t Tharp’s famous Sinatra Songs, dances performed to his recordings. Iverson isn’t echoing The Beatle’s sound. Rather he’s using their tunes as a jumping off place for his own creativity.

It’s clear that Morris and Iverson intend a deeper, personal exploration of the emotional and cultural currents underpinning The Beatles’ songs and their era.

To achieve that, the pair selected six songs from the album and arranged each number into a two-part composition. As in jazz, the first part of each section more or less lays out the recognizable melody of the tune.

The they allowed themselves a lot of creative latitude in building on these Fab Four classics.

Iverson introduces unusual tempi and dynamics, and the orchestration of piano, keyboard, saxophone, trombone, drums, a theremin, and a vocalist certainly doesn’t sound anything like The Beatles.

In the “Sgt. Pepper” number, Morris introduces not just “the one and only Billy Shears,” but also Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Karl Heinz Stockhausen, Sonny Liston, Marlene Dietrich, and a few others!

Iverson gives “Wait Til You’re 64” a bouncy, syncopated gloss, then has the bass line go out of sync with the melody, causing the dancers to break down, too, try as they may to stay on the non-existent beat.

Despite these and many other off-kilter, bewildering, or just plain wacky but always entertaining bits, there’s a great deal of romanticism in the piece as well. This is particularly evident in the adagio section of “With a Little Help from My Friends,” a transporting, lovingly danced pas de deux.

Morris deconstructs or just has fun with plenty of 1960s cultural touchpoints. In a bow to psychedelics and the Indian mysticism that The Beatles favored, he has one of his dancers sit on the stage during an entire section, legs crossed, wearing sunglasses, and staring blankly at the audience as if on a drug-induced trip, while the other company members do a separate choreography for several minutes.

And then there are Elizabeth Kurtzman’s stunning costumes, so evocative of the 1960s and the Carnaby St. fashions they reference. They still look great today.

The City of Liverpool commissioned Morris to create Pepperland as part of its 50th anniversary celebration of “Sgt. Pepper” in 2017. The 70-minute work became an instant success  with both critics and audiences and has been performed around the world since then.

It’s easy to see why Pepperland is such a crowd pleaser. For the most part it’s colorful, spirited, and a lot of fun. What makes it a major work, however, is that it’s also soulful, thoughtful, romantic, and inventive.

Though abstract, Pepperland feels complete, as a full-length story ballet would. Morris must have had that in mind when he elected to close the piece by having the dancers gather into the same tight ball that we saw when the lights first came up.

"Pepperland," The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 746-4000, www.thewallis.org