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City Lights: For the Beatles, all our loving in a tribute show

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I shared the same planet with the Beatles for one year, three months and two days. That was how old I was when John Lennon died, not that I learned that until nearly a decade later. By the time I first encountered the group, courtesy of the movie “Yellow Submarine,” it had long since been reduced to a thriving industry and a beloved — but irrevocably gone — part of the past.

We still perform Sophocles’ plays and trek to the Egyptian pyramids after thousands of years, so I have no reason to doubt that the Beatles’ music will have similar staying power. Just this summer, my wife and I visited Liverpool and took the Magical Mystery Tour bus ride, which guides tourists by the childhood homes of all four Beatles and points out historic points of interest — this street where two of the band members walked to school, for example, or this trail where one of them rode his bike.

The Beatles were not infallible musically (even the most diehard fan can probably name a least favorite song or album) and were all too fallible as human beings. Biographers have prospered for decades with accounts of Lennon’s temper, Paul McCartney’s bossiness, George Harrison’s moodiness and Ringo Starr’s substance abuse. We have been told countless times — including by the Beatles themselves — that they were men and not gods.

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But we still gawk at that bike trail through the bus window. At least, I did.

So it’s no surprise that when the Huntington Beach Academy for the Performing Arts planned its annual Beatles show this year, it opted for a theme that would seem absurd with any other band. The magnet high school, which in the past has had students perform “Revolver,” “Abbey Road” and other entire albums in concert, has spent the early fall rehearsing “After the Beatles: The Solo Years,” a set of the estranged bandmates’ 1970s tunes with documentary segments about the breakup and its aftermath.

It’s almost impossible to imagine another band’s postmortem inspiring a high school production (“Dreaming Alone: The Fall of Freddie and the Dreamers”?), but then, no other band is the Beatles. In this age when the Fab Four’s onetime secretary or driver can be the subject of an entire documentary, when publishers lovingly anthologize Starr’s postcards and Lennon’s angry letters, suffice to say that any part of the group’s story, however trivial, holds a touch of that aura.

Still, “After the Beatles,” which will run at First Christian Church in Huntington Beach on Nov. 6 and 7, doesn’t aim to cover a footnote in the band’s history. Rather, it’s meant as a tantalizing “what-if” scenario: a vision of what a Beatles concert might have been like if the band, after a decade of productive solo work, had buried its many hatchets and come together for a grand reunion. (Richard Linklater’s recent film “Boyhood” had the same idea; in one scene, the protagonist’s father gifts him a mixed CD of ex-Beatles tracks, which he reverently dubs “The Black Album.”)

Considering that the Fab Four essentially turned into four Fab Ones by the end of their careers, a program of all-solo tunes may not seem too jarring. Songs like “Band on the Run” and “Jealous Guy” could have fit snugly on any late-period Beatles release, and, for that matter, the former bandmates often collaborated in pairs or even trios after the breakup. The ex-Beatles feuded too, and often publicly — over contracts, musical styles, women and any combination thereof.

So what can teenagers in 2014 learn from the disillusioned end of the band’s story? During a rehearsal last week, I ducked into a quiet room with teacher Jamie Knight, who runs the program along with colleague Mike Simmons, and posed that question.

“I think they’ll see that these four guys were human,” Knight told me. “Like, John Lennon made a lot of sacrifices and he blew a lot of things with his own children, and at the very end, he kind of came to grips with that fact — that he was really trying to make, I think, amends for things that went wrong when he was raising children.

“So I think it is good for kids to kind of see the effects of success. The rose-colored-glasses thing of success is [that] everyone wants that, but there’s also a price that you pay with success, and it does impact your growth as a person.”

In the rehearsal room a few minutes later, the music itself echoed that emotion. More than a dozen students ran through Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over,” a pledge of personal renewal that, in a brutal irony, came out weeks before his murder. Senior Noah Hapke handled the lead vocal, sounding impressively like Lennon at times, while a film montage on the curtain behind him showed the singer’s final years.

Yes, I know the story — or, really, the multiple versions of it. With so much history now packing the shelves, you may read that Lennon actually became the family man he claimed to be, or that his domestic bliss was a carefully crafted illusion. For every accepted bit of Beatles’ lore, there seems to be at least one revisionist take. And anyone who reads Peter Doggett’s “You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup,” an intensely researched account of the band’s downfall, may even sour on listening to its music for a time.

But that time will end soon, and Anthony Grisham, an Academy for the Performing Arts alum who returned to teach guitar to the current students, reminded me why when I interviewed him last week.

“I know that, at some point in a high schooler’s career, they stumble across the Beatles,” said Grisham, who now attends Golden West College. “Whether they enjoy it or not, I think it still happens, even without this program. It doesn’t matter what the kids listen to. At least they’ll always know ....”

He hoisted his instrument on his lap and played the riff from “Day Tripper,” and everyone sitting around him smiled. That’s the true power of the Beatles. Whatever we come to know about them, it takes only a few seconds to believe in yesterday.

MICHAEL MILLER is the features editor for Times Community News in Orange County. He can be reached at michael.miller@latimes.com or (714) 966-4617.

IF YOU GO

What: “After the Beatles: The Solo Years,” preceded by a tribute to Carole King’s “Tapestry”

Where: First Christian Church, 1207 Main St., Huntington Beach

When: 6 p.m. Nov. 6 and 7

Cost: $20 to $40

Information: (714) 536-2514 or https://www.hbapa.org/shows

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