3/11/2023 0 Comments Lyrics wonderful time up there![]() “I’ve had dancers new to me dancing in pieces they had never seen,” Morris said. During the year he has been working on “The Look of Love,” he said he has had “maybe three or four rehearsals with the full complement of the 10 people cast in the piece.” Dancers missing rehearsals because they had Covid, the need to teach replacement dancers and then loop in the original dancers, the daily Covid tests: “It’s been tremendously difficult,” he said, on top of rehearsing rescheduled performances of “Pepperland” and other large works under the same uncertain conditions. “I’ve had despair,” Morris also said, but now he was talking not about Bacharach’s songs but about the process of creating a dance during a pandemic. “Rhythmically and harmonically, they’re thrilling.” The message, he added, is: You treated me bad as usual, “so goodbye, but I love you, question mark.’” “They’re all tragedy songs, and they’re all upbeat and kind of hopeful,” Morris said. So is the way that, by the time the instrumental break comes, those gestures have become choreographic motifs, deftly arranged to make musical sense. That kind of miming is a classic Morris device, which some viewers disparage and others love. On the word “heartbreak,” their fists tug their shirts at heart level. As Iverson put it, “Mark is very good with songs that tell a story.”Īt the start of “Say a Little Prayer,” when the lyrics are about waking up, combing hair and running for the bus, the dancers do those actions. In many ways, “The Look of Love” resembles not just “Pepperland” but most of Morris’s work to vocal music, whether Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys or Baroque opera. He gave us carte blanche.” In an email message, Bacharach said that what he has seen of Morris’s work online makes him excited for the show and that he feels his music is “in good hands.” “We were scared to ask about changing things. “I was like, Thank Goddess!” Morris said. For Morris, the most important part of the exchange came when Bacharach said, “You don’t want it to be boring.” Bacharach wanted the band to include a trumpet player, a crucial part of the Bacharach sound, and it does. Morris recounted a few Zoom sessions with the composer - “he was great and funny, and we basically saw the top of his head the whole time” - during which they discussed song choices and instrumentation. That song is in “The Look of Love,” too.īacharach, 94, has had minimal input. “Some people think it’s Easy Listening, but the details are subtle and very nerdy.” For example: the first measure of “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” Bacharach’s first hit with the lyricist Hal David, is in the unusual meter of 5/4. “But Bacharach is underrated, in terms of his sophistication,” Iverson continued. “These are songs you hear once and never forget.” “I would put Bacharach up there with Gershwin, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin as part of the American Songbook,” he said. ![]() Speaking over the phone while on tour in Germany, Iverson agreed. “People are always saying, ‘Oh my God, he wrote that?’ That’s why I’m doing it.” “This is great American music that people are either too familiar with or they’ve never heard it or they’ve never identified who wrote it,” Morris said. But in an interview after the rehearsal, Morris said the idea for a Bacharach show came first, many years ago, when Iverson was serving as musical director for Morris’s company and the two men discovered a shared love for Bacharach’s music. You might assume, then, that “The Look of Love” is a kind of sequel to “Pepperland” - similar time period, similar approach. The music is performed live, sung mostly by the Broadway veteran Marcy Harriell, and the arrangements, by the jazz pianist Ethan Iverson, take some liberties. Still, the weird version of “The Blob” was there to remind me that Morris’s take on Bacharach wouldn’t exactly be like the old records. It was Bacharach, after all: the theme song he wrote for the 1958 sci-fi horror movie “The Blob.” And the next songs were immediately recognizable: “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and, of course, “The Look of Love.” These are the hits, and there are more of them in Morris’s dance, which his company debuts on Thursday at the BroadStage in Santa Monica, Calif., before taking it to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Then I caught a lyric: “Be careful of the blob.” But the vocals that the dancers were moving to in precise patterns sounded like modernist opera, not the meticulous 1960s pop that Bacharach is mainly known for. ![]() It was the last of day of September, and I was attending a rehearsal of “The Look of Love,” Mark Morris’s new evening-length dance set to songs by Burt Bacharach. For a moment, I had no idea what I was listening to. ![]()
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