In 2012, San Francisco rock musician Chuck Prophet released Temple Beautiful, a 12-song shout-out to his hometown’s highs and lows, from raging history to personal moments, which at the time I lauded for including Willie Mays — and for being the best musical expression ever about the city.
Ten years later, Prophet and his writing collaborator, the local poet Kurt Lipschutz, are trying to turn the album into a musical, this time rubbing those layers of San Francisco’s past up against its tech-saturated present to get to the heart of what, as Prophet says, hasn’t changed: a city in some kind of war with itself.
The album had love and heartbreak, confusion and murder, a rainbow of representation including Mays, Harvey Milk, and porn pioneers the Mitchell Brothers, all orbiting around the Temple Beautiful, a real-life punk rock palace on Geary Boulevard. Its former lives were a synagogue and then the notorious People’s Temple. After the Jonestown horror, the punks took over for two brief years, fashioning it into a West Coast CBGB.
On the album’s title track, the Temple is where Prophet’s bright-eyed narrator takes in a show and meets a girl: “The lights came on, it was a whole new world!”
Temple Beautiful: The Musical began as a rough idea in the year or so after the record’s release, and it’s still far from a done deal. The story — or “book,” in theater parlance — follows a Google bus full of techies on an anodyne tour of the city. The bus gets waylaid by old-guard punks; one is a ghost, another has delusions of being Emperor Norton, SF’s 19th century exemplary eccentric — a wise, mad advocate for equal rights who still gets a lot of love.
They steer the bus down a completely different path that includes the Temple and a stop at the Willie Mays statue outside the Giants’ ballpark. Many songs ensue, some of which Prophet and Lipschutz have written expressly for the show.
It’s old-school artists versus interloping techies, but the work in progress doesn’t settle easily into stereotypes. And like the city it revels in, it doesn’t always make sense, but it does get across that once upon a time in San Francisco, a rich life didn’t always require riches.
And lest we forget during these just-get-by pandemic times, the musical also reminds us how much this city once let its freak flag fly.
It’s a city full of animals
A city full of thieves
It’s a city full of lovers
Trying hard to make believe
(Play That Song Again)
‘Amazing history in a ridiculous town’
Before COVID struck, Prophet and Lipschutz made some progress amid many fits and starts, even staging a live performance-slash-workshop in 2018. Then the project went on full hiatus. Now Prophet, 58, and Lipschutz, 66, are in revival mode, fighting through the pandemic’s economic and cultural uncertainty as well as Prophet’s recent diagnosis of what’s considered a very treatable form of lymphoma.
(Prophet says it came out of the blue: “I’d lost some weight; I figured I was doing something right.” You can catch updates on his Substack.)
The two of them are upfront about needing a lot of money for a real production, not just a bare-bones black box setup, and they’re open to making more changes. Their first big step happened a few weeks ago at a table read at a Sacramento theater where they have an ally in standup comedian and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” alumnus Jack Gallagher. (He read the part of the Emperor Norton character.)
If they pull it off, it could be the best live musical that’s uniquely San Francisco since … Beach Blanket Babylon, perhaps? Blanket keeps coming up when I ask people about the potential appeal of Temple’s very SF-centric story. Blanket never left the city, but it earned decades of success by inviting people “outside SF to come inside its doors,” says Emilie Whelan, a theater director who was involved in the Temple project before COVID hit. Everyone I spoke with who is or was involved is grappling with this same issue: How local should this story be? Who will it be for?
Megan Wicks, a Sacramento-based actor who at the table read played the former punk singer Sally Turner, praised the show for getting at the heart of the tensions in the city. “I feel I know more about the references, the culture, the tech versus punk thing because I lived it a little bit,” says Wicks, who worked in pre-pandemic SF at the Speakeasy cabaret show. “It’s so SF-specific, but when you know it, it makes sense.”
A lot of the rock-and-roll songwriting stuff that they knew went out the window when writing musical theater. ‘We have to make people give a shit what happens next.’
chuck prophet
Rob Karma Robinson, another actor at the table read, loved going down the research rabbit hole preparing to be Jerry No-Name, one of the punks. The Temple Beautiful, in particular, “had an amazing history in an amazingly ridiculous town.”
Sometimes the script is overloaded, like when O.J. Simpson (who grew up in Potrero Hill and went to Galileo High) shows up and gets crucified, which in an earlier version was the show’s second crucifixion. “Sorry, you only get one crucifixion,” says Peter Story, a theater jack-of-all-trades hired to arrange the table read, play one of the roles (the deceased “pope of punk” Dirk Dirksen), and offer unfiltered criticism. “A lot of writers tend to be precious,” Story says, “but both those guys are open and excited to make the piece better.”
Getting schooled
“Musical theater is a world, man,” says Prophet. It might sound at times like the rock or blues or pop world, but then the rules turn out to be different. “We learned the word ‘trope’ from the theater people,” adds Lipschutz. “It’s a stick they beat us over the head with.”
The hero’s journey. The “I want” song. The yellow brick road. The 11 o’clock number. All conventions of musical theater that, they were told, they couldn’t do without. And so they didn’t. “We studied a little,” says Lipschutz.
They’ve also revisited the nuts and bolts of songwriting. For example, says Prophet, the chorus in a rock song is “like giving somebody a cookie. The reason to put in a bridge is because you take the cookie away. And then when you give it back, people go nuts.”
Rock songs are worlds unto themselves. But in a musical, songs exist for the larger world that the musical creates. Each song doesn’t need that tension and release. You don’t always need a cookie. You need to move the story along. A lot of the craft Prophet and Lipschutz knew, “the little songwriting stuff, it went out the window,” says Prophet. “We have to make people give a shit what happens next.”
The duo has worked together for decades, with rough patches and long estrangements interspersed. The Temple album brought them back together after one of those patches. Lipschutz told an interviewer in 2013, “Working with him — and just knowing him — has been one of the peak experiences, and one of the roughest, of my life, depending on the day.”
They’re back to working intensely together, and the recent table read has given them plenty of feedback to work through. But the grand arc of the plot and characters is likely set. Despite the Google bus feeling a little, well, 2014, it’s still a great way to take people down the yellow brick road. Or, if you prefer, to do a magical mystery tour.
You got a problem with that?
The Google workers on the bus aren’t just along for the ride. One of them, named Ethan, sings a sneering boast about his high-tech influence in “You Got a Problem With That?” (It’s one of the new songs written for the show.)
Two years ago the Castro
Smelled like butt sex and crack
Now it’s like a bed of roses
I did it all with an app
But then Ethan realizes the Emperor Norton guy is actually J.J. Jericho, fresh out of the General Hospital psychiatric ward, who back in the day was the leader of one of his parents’ favorite bands. (“My parents owned the 7-inch of your first single. They saw you at the Temple Beautiful.”)
Ethan may be insufferable, but at least he’s local! That, and perhaps he’s more than meets the eye. Cue the tropes: he and others go through transformations, but Lipschutz and Prophet aren’t the types to end the yellow brick road at a happily-ever off-ramp. “It was difficult making [Ethan] likable without, you know, him quitting Google and becoming a homeless advocate,” says Lipschutz.
So yes, the story is a “cri de coeur,” as Emilie Whelan puts it, “like the artists of a community sounding the alarm of our city being lost.” But it’s also more complicated and funnier than the typical tech-is-ruining-San-Francisco rant, which the actors in Sacramento figured out fast singing the lines of “You Got a Problem.”
“I’ve had a long career in stand-up,” says Gallagher. “I know where the funny is.”
Prophet and Lipschutz now have a bit of a needle to thread to get the show produced. They’re ambitious enough to want real audiences, and they’re well aware that two straight middle-aged white guys aren’t high priority for a lot of art funders these days, even if the Temple characters are a mix of races and genders and orientations.
Yet they might have to “vanilla it out a little,” says Whelan — not in terms of race, but to pare down the encyclopedic references. “You want to make it accessible for someone from Chicago or Milwaukee,” she says.
Lipschutz doesn’t have a problem with that: “We’re not writing this for Rebecca Solnit. It’s a piece of entertainment like The Wizard of Oz or The Music Man. If we do our job, people will remember the music.”
