The Look of Love

Like Pepperland, the evening-length work set to Beatles songs that Mark Morris created a few years ago, Morris’s new Burt Bacharach production, The Look of Love, is pure pleasure. I went twice when it appeared at Berkeley’s Cal Performances this past weekend, and I admired it even more the second time. In many cases, what had seemed casually fun at first glance turned out to have complexities buried within it.

You don’t have to know Bacharach’s work well to enjoy this piece, though if you are a sentient human living in America in 2023, you no doubt do know some of Bacharach’s songs, even if you don’t know you know them. I myself, a non-listener to radio and an ignoramus about pop music, recognized five of the fourteen songs used in this hour-plus work, and those were the ones I could set a name to; many of the others had a familiar feel, probably because I had been obliviously surrounded by them at some point.

The pleasure starts with that key word “look.” Everything about this production is visually delicious. The colors in Isaac Mizrahi’s costumes—tangerine orange, guava pink, grape purple, cherry red, lime green, lemon yellow—suggest ice cream, tropical fruit, or some other good thing to eat. The simple set consists of five folding chairs and five round cushions, all in the same range of candy colors. The background screens against which these sets and costumes are displayed, in Nicole Pearce’s brilliant lighting design, move from a pale sunrise yellow to a deep, rich purple that makes you want to gobble up the whole stage. The dancers, too, are great to look at, not just because they display excellent rhythm, balance, speed, and other technical skills, but because they look like individual people, as Morris’s dancers always do.

Mark Morris’s key trait as a choreographer is always to match his dances to the music he has chosen—not just in terms of putting steps to notes, but also in terms of the whole mood he creates. His Handel feels like Handel; his Dvorak feels like Dvorak; and here he has produced something that feels, at least to me, like Burt Bacharach. There is an easy looseness to the dance style, a reliance on social-dance and free-form improv moves, that almost manages to suggest the ten people assembled onstage, inspired by the music they are listening to, have made up some of the steps and gestures themselves. But there is also far more synchronization than is usual in Morris’s work—a style one would normally associate with the more commercialized dance companies of the Bacharach era, like the Peter Gennaro dancers or the chorus in a twentieth-century musical.

The tunes were written by Bacharach (with lyrics, for the most part, by Hal David), but the arrangement here is by the wonderful jazz musician Ethan Iverson, who also worked with Morris on Pepperland. Iverson starts off the evening with a solo piano version of the Alfie theme song, played in a slow, quiet, quasi-noodling fashion while the curtain is still down. As the curtain rises, this morphs into “What the World Needs Now,” and Iverson’s little Big Band—Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, Simón Willson on bass, Vinnie Sperrazza on drums, Marcy Harriell as the lead vocalist, and Clinton Curtis and Blaire Reinhard singing backup—launches into its full-strength sound, which on this occasion filled UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall and made every word of the songs audible.

We needed to hear the words, because Morris uses them in his dance pieces: a bit of mimed coughing on the word “pneumonia” in “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” some car-driving in “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” a triple-threat pointing gesture to go with “Are You There (With Another Girl).” These are jokes, but they are also pleasures, coming around more than once and reminding us that a key element in song is repetition. Morris does not shy away from literalism; his dance for “Walk on By” is a walking dance, and if it is not quite as great as the walking dance in L’Allegro (but then, very little else in the world is), it is still satisfyingly complex as it reaches toward its conclusion.

In his youth Morris was always billed as a dance rebel, but he can be a traditionalist too, especially when the music calls for it. Elsewhere in his work he has played with gender roles, but here he maintains a strict separation between male dancers and female dancers—again, a nod to the kind of love Bacharach was always going on about. Partnering is always heterosexual here (though it is frequently promiscuous: Morris is fond of the American-square-dance move that brings a succession of different female partners to a circle of males), and when the dancers perform in smaller groups, they are often divided by gender. Still, they are divided in many other ways as well, and the five women perform as fiercely and as acrobatically as the five men. The costumes, too, work to break down the traditional division: Billy Smith and Nicole Sabella, for instance, wear similar big shirts over knee-length tights, and the always-marvelous Dallas McMurray manfully performs the entire program in a pink dress.

There were no boring moments in the short evening, but for me certain segments were standouts. One was “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” where the dancers’ sharp, renunciatory gestures emphasized the futile excess of the title, the fruitlessness of departing only to return. In one particularly beautiful sequence, a single couple danced forward on Marcy Harriell’s statement of the theme, followed several beats later by a second couple doing the same steps as the backup singers repeated the theme in a lower register. Morris is known to adore the musical structure called canon, and this was a classic use of it.

“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” was also terrific, not least because Ethan Iverson’s added plinks and rumbles in the opening section truly suggested rain. His musical evocation was perfectly matched by Pearce’s brief flashes of “lightning,” as well as by the dancers’ delightful imitation of children leaping over or into puddles. My favorite sequence in the dance was Domingo Estrada’s lovely soft-shoe-style solo, modeled (though I only got this the second time through) on Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain.”

If I had to single out one segment for highest praise, it would be the piece Morris composed to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” It’s hard to say why this was so great, except that there was an inherent match between Bacharach’s oddball beat here and the asymmetrical rhythmic structures Morris generally favors. Superficially, it didn’t look that much different from the other dances, with its ten figures variously darting around the stage and trading positions on the five seats. But it felt different in the way it surprised you. That shifting rhythm, the way the regular up-down two beats gave way to a faster three on “San-Jo-se,” allowed Morris to introduce a complex choreography of variously paced grapevine steps and unexpected skips. And since this is where his work excels—in the subtle details that are so stirring they make you feel like getting up and dancing yourself—I was glad when I saw it happening in The Look of Love.