Mark Morris: Pepperland review – Beatles with a touch of Broadway shuffle

Royal Court, Liverpool
The celebrated American choreographer swings into town for Sgt Pepper’s 50th birthday party

In May 1967, 50 years ago last Friday, the Beatles released their eighth studio album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Technically and musically innovative, the LP’s 13 tracks wove together the absurd, the surreal and the poignant to mesmerising effect, while at the same time remaining imaginatively rooted in the lives of the working-class people of Liverpool. The album would prove to be one of the most influential art-pop creations of the late 20th century, and today Liverpool remains a place of cultural pilgrimage, with the Beatles “industry” contributing more than £80m annually to the city’s coffers.

Sgt Pepper at 50 was conceived as a celebration of the Beatles’ legacy. The festival, which brings together artists as disparate as Jeremy Deller, Judy Chicago and DJ Spooky, all of them inspired by the album’s songs, opened on Thursday night with the premiere of Mark Morris’s Pepperland. The American choreographer is based in Brooklyn, and his response to the album has been to take half a dozen tracks, relocate them somewhere not too far off Broadway, and reinvent them as jazzy show tunes for the 15 dancers of his company.

The perkiness of When I'm Sixty-Four is undercut with skittering dashes of percussion and quickfire switches of rhythm