Like Ragtime, Temple Beautiful: The Musical throws together the famous and the notorious, curiosities and invented characters, greats and wannabes, hangers-on and the nouveau riche – plus a local hero gone bad in the extreme!
Entering the theater we are in San Francisco aboard a Google bus, where we meet an unruly mix of humanity: Sally Turner, Jerry No-Last-Name, Red, Ethan, Becca, Carol Doda, Kelli Krisp . . . and the Ghost of punk impresario Dirk Dirksen.
Their unlikely ringleader is Emperor Norton tour guide JJ Jericho, who takes them – and us – on a tangled journey, an urban Yellow Brick Road Trip all his own toward a fateful destination.
Along the way these aging misfits and masters of tomorrow seek the ever-elusive grail: common ground within the precarious pockets of today’s superheated economy. At times they even take refuge in the 19th century on the Barbary Coast.
Pitting Punks against Tech, Age & Experience against Innovation & Purchasing Power, Sharks against Jets, Temple Beautiful: The Musical is a genre-denying, interactive wild ride whose themes transcend the setting – even as it plumbs the hidden corners of San Francisco’s past, present and future.
Get ready for a Mobius strip of off-kilter comedy and pathos-driven drama. And looming behind the images of martyred politician Harvey Milk and of Halloween casualties is the stage where it all began: at the defunct punk club Temple Beautiful.
Simultaneously a love letter and a rough ride paying homage, meisterwerk Temple Beautiful shows Lou Reed how it’s done out West. Filtered through glimpses in the rearview mirror of rock ‘n’ roll, imagery plumbs the depths of heartbreak and soars to the heights of everyday, everyperson heroism.
klipschutz and I wrote these songs over the course of a year in my windowless shoebox workspace South of Market, without WiFi. I think of them as an unsentimental (though loving) tour of San Francisco tapping into the history, weirdness, energy, spontaneity, and all around eccentricity that drew us all here in the first place.
I guess we were a few years ahead of our time when it came to making up facts. It turns out we needed that time to let the characters in the play to slowly reveal themselves; to us and each other
