Masters of illusion - annual Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters - Western Wanderings - Column

Sunset, August, 1994 by Peter Fish

"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance,...and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process."

I don't normally go around spouting quotes from Henry James. But that one--or, actually, a mangled, half-remembered version of it--swam up from my subconscious last August as I watched architects and high school students turn into river oarsmen and Argentine gauchos.

The occasion was the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters, where, for 60 years, ordinary Southern Californians have been transformed into works of art. My first visit came in the 1960s--I don't remember the precise year, but I do recall the Monkees' "I'm a Believer" playing on the car radio as we threaded through festival traffic.

I became a believer that night, all right. I wasn't sure what I had witnessed, but I knew it had been something out of the ordinary. And when I returned last August to this pretty town on the Orange County coast, I wondered if the pageant's magic would still hold.

"Nothing I have ever done in any medium could prepare me for the Pageant of the Masters," director Glen Eytchison told me when I met him backstage before the show. Looking at the chaos that surrounded him, I understood what he meant.

The Pageant of the Masters belongs to an art form known as tableaux vivants, or living pictures, which is a concept that becomes more complicated the more you think about it. Turn people into paintings, you say to yourself--no problem. Give Pop a pitchfork and Mom an apron, and you've got American Gothic. Forget it. The Pageant of the Masters is to such play-acting what Rembrandt is to the Etch A Sketch.

Director Eytchison, who has the spiked hair and sharp features of a drummer in a British rock band, begins planning the following season's pageant in October. His first task is selecting the artworks. Impressionists are a favorite: "Paintings that are highly textured, like Van Goghs and Renoirs, usually reproduce well." But he needs to vary the visual diet. So he hops centuries and genres, moving from paintings to three-dimensional art forms such as gilded 17th-century saltcellars and carved-teak Thai bodhisattvas. Set design begins in December, casting of the more than 200 roles begins in January, and rehearsals run from February until the show opens in July.

"There is no stealth technology" in the pageant, Eytchison told me, meaning he doesn't deploy holograms or lasers for his special effects. But backstage, ample old-fashioned trickery was on display. I watched makeup director Joy Trent slather cast member Ernesto Morales's face in umber and chrome yellow to render the play of sunlight and shadow in George Caleb Bingham's 19th-century oil Raftsmen Playing Cards. Who was the hardest artist to imitate? I asked Trent. "That pointillist guy," she said wearily. "Seurat. Dots. Lots of dots."

Then there are the laws of perspective. In Western painting, background figures are smaller and higher up than foreground figures. To achieve this effect, children are dressed as adults and perched on armatures, which is why I saw 14-year-old Zarah Antongiorgi, clad in sombrero and goatee, climbing up to portray an Argentine cowboy in James Walker's Gauchos in a Horse Corral.

When it's showtime, the artworks are wheeled onstage, where they stay for a minute or two while their actors attempt to keep perfectly still. The finale is, invariably, da Vinci's The Last Supper, whose central role of Jesus Christ has been played for the last 28 years by Charles Thompson. "Every year, toward the end of the run, I say I'm done with it," Thompson said. "But I just keep going back."

There have been stumbles on the road to artistic perfection. One memorable evening, a boy playing a figurine on a jeweled Scythian comb threw up as the bauble rolled onstage. But during the performance I watched, all illusions were beautifully maintained. Zarah was a proud gaucho, Ernesto a rustic raftsman, Charles sorrowfully dignified.

Great beauty always carries an aura of vulnerability, though. Two months after my visit, pageant and town revealed theirs. On October 27, a fire started in Laguna Canyon. Before it was contained, 16,682 acres and 366 structures had been destroyed. Flames singed the pageant grounds--"Trees just exploded," Eytchison recalls--but were beaten back.

Two weeks later, disaster struck again. Rains pounding charred hillsides loosed a mud slide that buried the pageant building and stage. "It looked like The Poseidon Adventure," says Eytchison. "Walls buckled. We lost our archives, our computers, an art library that took 60 years to compile."

But within a half-hour, says Eytchison, "people were showing up with shovels." Day after day, volunteers excavated sets and costumes from the muck. "It's really changed my life. To witness something like this gives you a lot of faith."

And so this summer, the pageant embarks on its 61st season. Joy Trent will wield her makeup brush, and Charles Thompson will preside over The Last Supper. And the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters will once again demonstrate how art can make interest, make importance, make life.