Theater

More techno on stage, please!

I’m willing to overlook a lot of the script’s weaknesses in “Beautiful Burnout” because the movement scenes are so good. Besides, I never expect much from a boxing story anyway: Happy families are all alike, Tolstoy wrote, and so are boxing stories — they’ve got to form the most predictable subset of sport-themed narratives. (Oddly I find myself enjoying the FX series “Lights Out,” but that’s because the show actually is about life after boxing.)

Anyhoo, Bryony Lavery’s script is adequate, which is just fine since it’s not the reason you go to “Beautiful Burnout”: You go for the action, directed and choreographed by Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett. And as a big fan of techno, I was very happy to see those scenes set to music by Underworld and played at an appropriately high volume. This alone could be a turnoff for some theatergoers, but it could also prompt others to buy tickets for St. Ann’s Warehouse.

Underworld’s “Born Slippy” had been put to very good use by Danny Boyle in “Trainspotting” — so much so that the director called on the band to write original music for his staging of “Frankenstein,” currently playing in London. At a time when Broadway is welcoming Elvis (“Million Dollar Quartet”), hair metal (“Rock of Ages”) and the Beatles (“Rain”), while Branford Marsalis writes incidental music in plays (“Fences”), this counts as radical forward-thinking.

Despite my good will, though, I’m not all that psyched about the recently announced decision to bring back Graham and Hoggett’s previous show, “Black Watch,” for a third run at St. Ann’s on April 16-May 8. It’s a good piece but come on, can we get a break? We just saw it in 2007 and in 2008 after all.