When I first saw Mark Morris’s bullseye-hitting “Pepperland” oh so many years ago at Segerstrom Center in Orange County, I was so ebullient through the entire thing that after the show, I clambered backstage to congratulate Mr. Morris in person. I don’t typically do that. I’m a dance critic. I felt I had to, I was awed, elated.
I cannot wait to ‘clamber,’ yet again, this time to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills re-see Morris’s compendium of clever cacophonous dance interpreting the Beatles’ genius 1967 album — a cultural event so weighty that Planet Earth tipped off its axis a few notches. It has yet to recover.
As for the aforementioned “Billy Shears,” the fictional name was attached to Beatle drummer Ringo Starr, aka Sir Richard Starkey, as Paul McCartney told Ultimate Rock Magazine in a 2017 interview:
“Billy Shears is another name that sounds like a schoolmate, but isn’t. Ringo is Billy Shears.
“It just happened to turn out that we dreamed up Billy Shears. It was a rhyme for ‘years’ … ‘band you’ve known for all these years’… We thought, ‘That’s a great little name.’ It’s an Eleanor Rigby-type name. A nice atmospheric name and it was leading into Ringo’s track.
“So, as far as we were concerned, it was purely and simply a device to get the next song in.”
Creative people roll like that. As does Mark Morris, of course, with “Pepperland,” which he created in 2017 for Liverpool’s 50th celebration of the Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. With a reimagined score by Evan Iverson, the delightful Pepperscape transports the viewer into a colorful 1960’s British Mod landscape.
Anywhere across the universe but Trumpland, people!!!
Dance’s much-admired music man, Morris has interspersed arrangements of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, “With a Little Help From My Friends”, “A Day in the Life”, “When I’m Sixty-Four”, “Within You Without You”, and “Penny Lane” with six original Pepper-inspired pieces — a crazy amount of creativity. A chamber music ensemble of voice, theremin, soprano sax, trombone, two keyboards, and percussion teases out and elaborates on “Sgt. Pepper’s” non-rock and roll influences.
We rest assured that Mark Morris, whose cultural appetites span from the Baroque to Beatlemania, will forgive our sentimental attachment this song-and-dance homage to Sargent Pepper by four show-business ladies: Gwen Verdon, Carol Burnett, Bobby Gentry and Phyllis Diller on the Carol Burnett Show
We wrote abut it here. Very clever bit!
PEPPERLAND | Mark Morris Dance | The Wallis | May 16-18