Inspired by the Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the production takes the well-known songs as its start point but then expands the music and dance into unexpected directions with new composition and choreography.

Pepperland was critically acclaimed when it premiered at the festival but Morris, one of the world’s leading choreographers and artistic director of New York based Mark Morris Dance Group, admits he was unsure about the project when he was first approached.

“It was Sean Doran, who was curating the festival and who I’ve known for a very long time, who asked me. I thought it was very surprising because it was kind of short notice and it’s not a project I would have thought of on my own. I took some time to think about and decided there was enough interesting information and potential excitement to go ahead with it.”

The piece was actually commissioned on a slight misunderstanding because Doran was asking a number of artists to create pieces for individual tracks from the album – but Morris thought he was choreographing for the entire album.

“I didn’t understand that,” recalls Morris. “I thought he meant the whole thing but then I learned later that he meant different tracks for different people but by then Ethan and I had decided on about six numbers to do. It wouldn’t have been that interesting for me to do just one song.”

Working with composer Ethan Iverson, Morris created a piece with new arrangements of Beatles classics 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 as well as original composition.

Morris was determined to give audiences something unexpected but he did admit to some nervousness about how the interpretation would be received in the Beatles’ home city.

“Every single person who lives in Liverpool is related to or went to school with one of the Beatles so they are all experts in all things Beatles,” he laughs. “I was ‘I sure hope they like it – because if not I’ll hear about it!’

“I had no clue if it was going to work or not. We put it together very quickly because it was added onto all the work we already do all of the time – touring, rehearsing, performing – and then we added on this project.

“And we were like ‘Can we get this done in time? Can we get the rights to the music and choreograph and compose and rehearse and design all this in the very short time we have?’ So I was very relieved to have finished it in time to perform it and then was doubly happy that it was successful.

“But if they had wanted a trip down memory lane by an English person then they wouldn’t have asked me! That’s not the kind of stuff I do. I think Sean knew what he was getting into when he asked me.”

There was an element of personal memory for Morris though – as he actually saw the Beatles performing live.

“It was the last tour before they stopped touring. I lived in Seattle and it was about 1966, I was like ten, and I saw them with my sisters and a bunch of their friends and it was a screaming nightmare! I knew their music from the radio and went with my sisters thinking it would be fun – but it wasn’t! It was crazy. I think they stopped touring because nobody was listening to them, they were all too busy screaming!”

But a year later the Beatles released the iconic Sgt Pepper – an album which Morris found fascinating to take as inspiration.

“This album was never meant to be performed which is interesting,” he says. “It was unperformable – and that was one of the reasons I chose to do it. I only work with live music, I wouldn’t dream of working with recorded music, so it had to be a completely different take on the album.

“It was the first of its kind – it’s fabulous and very varied with a short attention span. The Beatles were very young and they were thinking ‘let’s try out this and this’. It’s a shopping trip of a composition – there’s stuff from every aisle.”

Armed with the album, long-term collaborators Morris and Iverson set about creating a show which would take the Beatles’ music and give it a new lease of life. Morris, who launched MMDG in 1980 and has created nearly 150 works for the company, ensures live music is at the heart of his work so it was imperative they didn’t just reproduce the album.

“I do a lot of research on any score and Ethan also loves that so we went deeper into the history and the background of the influences,” recalls Morris.  “Also the album itself is only 40 minutes long so we substantiated it with the music that Ethan wrote. So there’s new music within it and new ideas about music.

“The cultural research we did meant we came up with this particular show. For example there’s the Indian music on Sgt Pepper. That album may have been the first time I heard Hindustani influences in music when I think about it. I was listening to a lot of different music from very young but that may be the first kind of semi-Indian thing I heard.”

Pepperland features a chamber music ensemble of voice, theremin, soprano sax, trombone and two keyboards. The production has been described as ‘witty’, ‘humorous’, ‘joyous’ and ‘eccentric’. And its sixties-influenced brightly coloured costumes created by Elizabeth Kurtzman ensure it’s an eye-catching tribute to the period in which the Beatles became international pop idols.

Since being performed in Liverpool nearly two years ago, Pepperland has been staged across the United States of America and in Canada. And this spring it comes to the UK and Ireland on a six-week tour presented by Dance Consortium, a group of 20 British theatres which aim to stage and promote international contemporary dance.

Beginning in mid-March, the tour takes in London, Birmingham, Salford, Bradford, Edinburgh, Canterbury, Cardiff, Plymouth, Southampton, Norwich, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Dublin.

Since its creation, Morris says Pepperland has needed little revision.

“I’ve made a couple of minor changes with things I wasn’t quite happy with but other than that it’s the same piece. I’ve recast it when we are performing it for the six weeks of the tour so dancers can swing in and out of it to make it less pressured on individuals.”

Morris has been hailed as the ‘most successful and influential choreographer alive and indisputably the most musical’ by the New York Times. From 1988 to 1991, he was Director of Dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels and in 1990 he founded the White Oak Dance Project with dancer, actor and choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov.

He has created works for more than 20 ballet companies worldwide and directed and choreographed productions for The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, English National Opera and The Royal Opera, among others. With a career spanning 40 years and numerous tours of the UK, he has built up a firm following this side of the Atlantic.

“We’ve been going to Britain for more than 30 years and my work is popular there. I’ve been going there for ever and I like it. We haven’t been for a long tour around the Isles for about five years so we’re looking forward to performing Pepperland there.”

And, while the Beatles’ music is its springboard, Morris says audience members don’t need to be Beatles fans to enjoy the show.

“How someone feels personally about the Beatles’ music might make a difference to the individual but my catchphrase is that ‘this piece is for people who love or hate the Beatles’ – I figure that covers a lot of people right there! And then there’s some others in-between who I hope will come and see it.

“And they’ll be surprised by it. If you are going for a tribute show with a cover band playing Beatles hits that you can sing along with – that’s not going to happen. You can do that afterwards in a bar! This show is fully rooted in the interesting and surprising and radical music of this particular album but also that period of popular music in general.

“Nobody else would create this kind of treatment of this album except for me and Ethan and my company. It’s one of a kind and I promise it’s really fun and interesting and entertaining and beautiful – and a bunch of other things!”

Read our review of Pepperland at The Lowry. Visit website for full tour details.

The post Choreographer Mark Morris Spices up Sgt Pepper appeared first on Quays Life.

Morris was commissioned by the City of Liverpool to create Pepperland as a homage to The Beatles’ ground-breaking 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The piece premiered in 2017 as part of Liverpool’s Sgt. Pepper at 50 Festival and is now touring the UK until May.

So, if it is not dance choreographed to the album, what is it about? Well, while it captures the psychedelic mood of the album, the music is an original score by composer Ethan Iverson which is inspired by rather than a cover of the album.

The show opens with an arrangement of Sgt. Pepper, in which baritone, Clinton Curtis introduces some of the personalities from the LP cover. Dancers mimic Shirley Temple, Marlene Dietrcih, Oscar Wilde and Laurel and Hardy. And when we get to The Beatles, there is screaming hysteria.

Morris weaves humour through the piece, which is part nostalgia and part futuristic dream. ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ is all bounce and playfulness. ‘When I’m Sixty Four’ goes from high camp to a chained can-can to an out-of-sequence kid’s party game gone wrong, as dancers each perform a different routine out of time with the music.

‘With You Without You’ has a more meditative feel. While ‘Penny Lane’, which was not on Sgt Pepper but was originally planned to be, sees the dancers act out the characters in a joyous narrative, inducing the same elated spirit much of The Beatles music still invokes.

All the tracks aren’t there. Most notably there is no ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. This is Beatles music, but not as we know it. And when something is so familiar it takes a while to accustom to it sounding different.

That said, the live band is terrific, and Curtis’ rich vocals give the lyrics a fresh clarity. Iverson also uses the haunting sound of a theremin in ‘A Day in the Life’ to give a trippy electronic feel. This, combined with the spinning of the athletic dance is at times literally dizzying.

It all plays out in front of a sparkling foil mountain range and a vibrant background that shifts from emerald green to electric blue, fuchsia pink, and jaffa orange. Elizabeth Kurtzman’s costumes use the same neon palette of The Beatles’ original album cover, creating an explosion of colour on stage. No wonder so many of the cast are wearing shades. It’s bright, sunny and deceptively skilful. A fitting homage to Liverpool’s Fab Four.

Pepperland is at The Lowry on 29 and 30 March 2019 and touring the UK til May 2019. Visit website for full tour details.

Read our interview with choreographer Mark Morris.

The post Pepperland Dance Review at The Lowry appeared first on Quays Life.

Now the show, which has enjoyed West End and Broadway runs, is returning to the stage on a UK tour for 2018 – but not as fans will have seen it before.

Let It Be: A Celebration of the Music of the Beatles Part II features all the Fab Four’s classic tracks from the 1960s. But while the first half of the theatrical performance is comprised of those favourites from the group’s stellar career, the all-new second half imagines a world in which the four Liverpool musicians reunited a decade after they went their separate ways.

Promoter and lifelong Beatle fan, Jeff Parry, of Annerin Productions, talks to Quays Life about changes to the smash hit show, and what UK audiences can expect.

Where did the idea for this new production come from?
Well, funnily enough it was the original idea. I’d had in my mind for 30 years what a reunion of The Beatles would have been like. It was bringing it down to a significant time when you could do it. I thought 9 October 1980, John Lennon’s 40th birthday, rather than a fictitious date, and I wanted to keep it a positive scenario. So, I always wanted to do that.

Then when I first came upon, Rain, which had started in North America, they said, we already have a Beatles show, and I said okay, that makes sense. That became an entity in itself, and the show kept working. We later split with Rain and created Let It Be in the UK, and it was really successful.

Anyway, I was trying to figure out how to put out a separate show from Let It Be, but creating a competing show with so many others already in the market was a concern.
I came up with the idea of condensing the original show into the first half and doing the reunion in the second half. I wasn’t sure if this was possible with all the costume and set changes, but our production manager said he could pull it off, which was a bit of surprise.

Next, we had to worry if we were messing with a successful brand – but frankly stuck with the Beatles mantra that creating change and pushing the limits is what made them unique. With that in mind, we told promoters who had booked the original show that, although the name remained Let It Be, the show now included a reunion. I guaranteed if the audiences didn’t like it more that we would return their money.

So what can fans of Let It Be expect from the new show?
The whole (original) show is in the first half. It’s like it’s on steroids! All the set changes remain, and you still get the whole show. All the content is there. Half way through we do Sergeant Pepper, and sometimes people get up after that, thinking that’s the interval!

The first half ends with the final medley from Abbey Road. Before the second half starts, we scroll film saying The Beatles are squabbling and breaking up. Then eventually John and Paul are talking again and we say what if they DID get together? Just imagine!

The Beatles of 1980 are dressed in clothes of the time and there are no costume changes in the second half. The lighting and whole feel is very natural.

You’ve staged the new show in the US and Canada. What has the audience response been like?
It’s neat watching people’s faces. They’ve never seen things in a context like this. We start off with a Paul McCartney song and then a Lennon song. All four Beatles get a chance to lead.

Along with the solo songs we have added Beatles songs which were not in the original show, like Got To Get You Into My Life. You have to imagine what they would have done if they had reunited – I’m sure it would have been even more eclectic.

We had Japanese and UK partners in to see it and they said: “This is a better show than the other one.” It’s because it’s unique. The online chat is that this is the best Beatles show ever.

If you had been a fly on the wall at a real reunion, which song would you have liked to have heard them play?
Oh gosh, I haven’t really thought about it! Probably Helter Skelter – I’ve always wanted to see them rip it up like that.

I’ve got a bunch of favourite songs. And Your Bird Can Sing, and I Need You are two others.

What were your initial expectations/ambitions for the original Let It Be show?
I had absolutely no expectations for Let It Be (then called Rain) when we were asked by a radio station in Calgary to get a Beatles band to play five songs in their parking lot to announce the opening of their new brand Q107. I had been in the music business as a promoter, record label and producer for 25 years at this point.

I hated Beatle tribute bands, as their first intent was to look like them with musical ability not even close. I usually ran when the opportunity to see a Beatle tribute show presented itself.

In this case, we found the group Rain who were older and could play note for note. They blew me away and that took something.

So it’s easy to say that from going from a parking lot to Broadway, the West End and now our third tour of the UK was never close to my expectations, and if had told my wife she probably would have had me committed!

Which part of Let It Be Part II gets the biggest audience reaction?
The second half of the new Let It Be brings an emotional response as this gives the audience something they never have seen, a reunion which could have been.

I love to watch people’s faces when they see a Lennon song followed by a Harrison song. It’s almost as if they didn’t link the two together. Oh yes, those guys were in the same band at one time?

The Lennon songs from Double Fantasy and then, of course, Imagine bring real emotion as they have never been performed live, and it reminds us all of how much he is missed and how much more he could have contributed.

It’s now almost 50 years since The Beatles broke up. Why do you think their music and legacy endures?
It’s quite simply why The Beatles’ music still lives on, great songs, nothing else. Their life stories wouldn’t be of any interest otherwise.

They had this magic and one has to give Brian Epstein the first credit in shaping them to look appealing and not giving up on getting a record deal, as without his panache and will to make it happen I am sure it would not.

Secondly, George Martin helped shape their songs in ways they couldn’t, but learning from that they expanded their ideas past their early, more simple material.

I also feel that for my generation, they grew as did we all. Although this all really only happened in seven years, those were formative years for those like myself who was nine in ’64.

There’s been no other band which took the risks and grew without being obviously commercial. Today it would be suicide for a group to try to wander from their obvious fan appeal, one reason why music is so boring.

Tell me a bit about your personal relationship with the band and their music. You’ve described it as the “soundtrack of my life”.

I got into the business because of The Beatles. I was given their first album at the age of nine. No matter what other music I got in to, I always put The Beatles on a pedestal with no peers. They are still my ‘go to’ group throughout the week when I want to get a lift.

I have a wide interest in music from classical to AC/DC, but nothing compares to The Beatles. They’re in a league of their own.

Have the real Beatles reacted to Let It Be?
The Beatles allow Let It Be and the other related Beatle shows to survive as long as they are not pushed. We have the grand rights for the Lennon/McCartney songs as well as those from George Harrison and Ringo Starr which are played in the reunion.
That is rare, and recognises that Let It Be has the quality above all of the other ‘tribute shows’.

What’s next for Jeff Parry?
Interesting, we are starting up a new division of Annerin Theatricals, which will deal with book musicals, meaning those with a script.

Let It Be is not a book musical and has a very limited script. It tells the history of The Beatles through the music, played in chronological order, film clips and costume changes.

We have a few new titles which are going into production, the first being Juke Box Hero, which features the music of Foreigner.

I was approached by Phil Carson, who used to run Atlantic Records in the UK and noted for his relationship with Led Zeppelin, signing AC/DC, Twisted Sister and ABBA amongst many others. He knew that we were starting to do shows on Broadway and said that he had a treatment for Juke Box Hero written by Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais, whom had also written the screen plays for The Commitments and Across The Universe. Phil said if I paid for the script the show was mine.

That was seven years ago and we are now mounting it Alberta this coming summer with design for it to be Broadway and West End bound. At least we’re taking it up a notch from starting in a parking lot this time as we are in a legitimate theatre!
It seems I am surrounded by Brits and thank God for it. We’re also looking in to a show based on the life of Alice Cooper and his manager Shep Gordon, again with a treatment written by Dick and Ian. We’re actually trying to mount it in the UK within the next couple of years.

Thirdly we have a John Lennon bio, Through A Glass Onion, which we want to produce on a larger scale than the original two man show, which played Liverpool.
Yes, so at the ripe old age of 62 I seem to have more passion then I did when I was younger. Time will tell ‘when I’m 64’.

Let it Be is at The Opera House, Manchester from 22-27 October 2018. See website for full tour details.

The post Jeff Parry talks about his new look Beatles musical Let it Be Part II appeared first on Quays Life.