In Laguna

When a Laguna Beach, Calif. garage owner named Harold Bradley was solemnly tapped on the back by his grey-haired fellow citizen Roy M. Ropp and told: "You are The Laughing Cavalier," he neither called a cop, took to his heels, nor swung on the tapper. Like all good Lagunites, Bradley knew at once that this tapping singled him out for an honor--the honor of depicting one of the Living Masterpieces in Director Ropp's famed "Pageant of the Masters."

Of all the art colonies in California, Laguna is the artiest. Once a year, Laguna citizens put berets on their heads, hang palettes to the lamp posts along principal streets, welcome thousands of visitors to a ten-day cultural spree.

Laguna's flag-bedecked festival site last week was a fenced-in, eucalyptus-shaded vacant lot two blocks from the sea. Under a big top near the puppet-show tent such bright California lights as Millard Sheets, William Wendt, William Griffith, Frank Cuprien, Ruth Peabody hung their pictures; the works of lesser lights were displayed in sideshow booths forming an open square. In one booth free oils and modeling clay tempted visitors to test their talent. In another a fortune teller revealed if they had any to test.

The evolution of Laguna's elaborate art-shindy from the first threadbare effort of 1932, when depression-dumped artists hung their canvases on a fence facing Main Street and hoped for the best, has been gradual but steady. Five years ago, Real-estate Dealer Ropp, who is also a painter in his spare time, thought up a final terrific touch: a series of tableaux reproducing famous paintings and sculpture on a picture-frame stage. This year 44 paintings and ten pieces of sculpture are on the program. Its 54 letter-perfect, 90-second blackouts introduced by singers and dancers, separated by orchestral interludes and culminating in da Vinci's Last Supper, have reached a professional pitch of perfection.

For months prior to the opening, more than 100 actors, including such local celebrities as Octogenarian Ella H. Goodrich, who does Whistler's Mother, and ebony-skinned Janitor Felix Nelson (Vedder's The African Sentinel), rehearse their tableaux as religiously as any Oberammergau Passion Player. This year, with the Assistance League of nearby Santa Ana offering $200 in art prizes, and the buildup of the local Chamber of Commerce corralling 1,500 spectators into every performance, The Festival of Arts at last got on a paying basis. Jubilant Director Ropp hoped to net $4,000, looked forward to the day when his pageant would have its own permanent outdoor theatre.

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