By Debra Cash

There’s something gleefully retro about his hour-plus-long jukebox.

The Look of Love, Mark Morris Dance Group presented by Global Arts Live, at Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston, through January 26.

A scene from Mark Morris Dance Group’s The Look of Love. Photo: Molly Bartels

The Look of Love, Mark Morris Dance Group presented by Global Arts Live, at Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston. Runs through January 26

Pop music invariably evokes who you were at the age when you first heard it. American choreographer Mark Morris, born in 1956, would have been a tween and teen when Burt Bacharach’s songs were topping the charts, and there’s something gleefully retro about his hour-plus-long jukebox The Look of Love.  (I should note that Morris has stated flatly that no, this isn’t a piece about reprising anyone’s youth. He has his intentions. I have my impressions from sitting in the audience. Read on.)

In interviews, Morris has compared Bacharach’s oeuvre to George Gershwin’s (Bacharach and his lyricist collaborator, Hal David, did win the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2012).  To my ear, Bacharach’s style is closer to the Irving Berlin of White Christmas, with his songs’ unexpectedly wistful chromaticism slipped in like backward glances. All three of these Jewish-American composers were American musical sponges, absorbing and foregrounding rhythmic and melodic influences from jazz, Latin rhythms, and the blues. (If Rob Kapilow hasn’t done it yet, Bacharach’s style would be a natural for unpacking during one of his charming What Makes It Great? presentations.)

The MMDG dancers — mostly new since the company last appeared in prepandemic Boston, six years ago — wear Isaac Mizrahi’s gender-fluid costumes: dresses over leggings for men, pants for women, all colored like a box of Jordan Almonds. As an overture, Ethan Iverson at the piano in the pit asks “what’s it all about (Alfie)” and the choreography is prepared to answer that question in quick little pantomime snippets.

• Mountains enough to climb = arms thrown up!
• Rivers to cross = dancers roll and heave!
• Sunbeams = throw arms to the right!
• Moonbeams = to the left!

And since the world — no, not just some, but everyone! — needs love, an interweaving palm-to-palm circle dance and contra dance leave nobody out.

Legible, yes. Subtle, hardly.

From a choreographer who created one of the most demanding and enthralling circle dances in American modern dance history, “Grand Duo” to Lou Harrison, it’s a bit disconcerting.

The Look of Love  becomes more inventive when, in Iverson’s playful arrangement, the raindrops start plopping. In a long windup to the song, Morris creates a syncopated hopscotch skipping pattern as the musical theme passes back and forth between the piano to the delicious warmth of Jonathan Finlayson’s trumpet. I could have done without the dancer crying into a round yellow pillow, but that was par for the course when, a bit later, put to use on the L.A. freeway, those pillows morphed into steering wheels. And did Marcy Harriell’s gospel-y singing on “Don’t Make Me Over,” which leaned into the blues, really need a blue backdrop to make the point?

Morris’s famous waggishness is never completely out of sight. Who knew that Bacharach had composed a song called “The Blob” for a horror movie in 1958? The episode cuts the evening’s choreographic saccharine with a mass of zombies who seem, in Nicole Pearce’s deft lighting, as if they were being viewed through a diffuser or a TV on the blink. And the “always something here to remind me” seems to have been sexually transmitted, with the dancers scratching persistent itches.

Mark Morris’s ability to manipulate stage space remains second to none. By simply moving a few pastel colored folding chairs (Mizrahi is credited with those, too) the shape of the space seems to shift, the slight action narrowing and widening our attention. This is most effective when some of the dancers are sitting with their backs to the audience or when the center of the stage space is still and two groups of dancers flank it with their energies.

Those spatial decisions make their biggest impact during “The Look of Love” — the bossa nova we’ve been anticipating all night — where a man, seated, and a woman standing behind him, match reaching gestures towards a beloved who, it seems, can only be seen in their minds’ eyes. When the two finally find each other and embrace, the shape of their arms is sculptural, each lover framed in the other’s arms. They are loving. In a poor substitute, the rest of us are relegated to just looking.

Debra Cash is a Founding Contributing Writer to the Arts Fuse and a member of its Board.