Pepperland review – Mark Morris’s Lonely Hearts Club dancers are a dream

Pepperland review – Mark Morris’s Lonely Hearts Club dancers are a dream

With Mark Morris it always starts with the music. His new work Pepperland has been created for the celebratory Sgt Pepper at 50 festival, but Morris has done nothing so simple as choreograph the Beatles’ album itself. Instead, he’s commissioned a new score from composer Ethan Iverson, featuring six boldly idiosyncratic reinventions of the original songs. A Day in the Life comes with haunting piano and theremin; a wonderfully arthritic version of When I’m Sixty-Four has its vaudeville rhythms creakily jangled and out of key.