In Laguna Beach, a Living Louvre

By Michael Demarest

Look quick! That Botticelli Venus is Aunt Marge!

A celebrated artists' colony before soaring real estate prices displaced the easel set, Southern California's Laguna Beach is better known these days for a kind of living Louvre. Each July and August, as the crowning glory of its 50-year-old Festival of the Arts, the town mounts a Pageant of the Masters: a display of tableaux vivants reproducing famous artworks with human figures in a 12-ft. by 30-ft. picture frame onstage. The show runs slightly more than two hours at an outdoor theater called the Irvine Bowl.

For some of the 17,000 Lagunatics, as the locals call themselves with a fair degree of accuracy, this trompe l'oeil in reverse is a year-round obsession. With the help of 20 full-time backstage professionals, 500 volunteers put on the nightly exhibitions, which lure 300,000 viewers and will gross $1.8 million this year. The festival distributes $100,000 in art scholarships to Laguna High School graduates.

The locals act as if their tableaux came down from Mount Parnassus. Some 4,500 dues-paying ($5 a year) members of the festival organization have the right to buy 16 tickets at up to $20 each. "The pageant is a chance for us to be part of something creative," explains Clem Troy Sr., a Laguna-based engineer, who, with his wife and three children, has taken part in four of them. "I'm no artist myself, but the pageant is part of this country's culture."

The artistic director, Glen Eytchison, 27, is an intense veteran of Southern California repertory theater, whose appointment four years ago stirred premonitions that he would emphasize avant-garde art, even (Pollock forbid!) abstract expressionists. Not to worry. "You have to understand the people of Laguna," Eytchison allows. "I am concerned with retaining their tradition. Of course, the show has to be bigger and better every year, but you can only stretch so far." This year's edition stretches to 24 tableaux, each of which is shown for about 90 seconds. They range from classics like Degas' Dancers Practicing at the Bar and Seurat's Bathing to canvases by American painters Winslow Homer (Crab Fishing off Yarmouth) and John Sloan (Picnic Grounds). There are also reproductions of a medieval tapestry, History of Venus, and several sculptures, notably St. George and the Dragon by Fritz Preiss and Fulda's 11th century antependium for Basel Cathedral. An audience favorite is Norman Rockwell, who has four Saturday Evening Post covers this year. As always, the pageant winds up with Da Vinci's Last Supper.

To remind glassy-eyed viewers that the scenes are not simply enlarged reproductions of originals, Director Eytchison shows the cast actually taking their places in the Homer painting while screens of a roiling sea and a tempestuous sky are lowered into place. It is the hit of the show. A mildly didactic narration is supplied by eight-year Veteran Thurl Ravenscroft, who provides off-pageant the voice for television's Tony the Tiger ("Grreeaatt!"). There is a suitably reverent score by Richard Henn, a prolific composer who has scored five feature films.

The show has had its share of artistic problems. Sea breezes used to ruffle the models' clothes until someone devised a stiffener to make them lie flat. Unclothing was even more of a challenge in a more circumscribed age. When a director broke the modesty barrier by offering to pay nude models $10 a night, critics objected to this violation of volunteerist esprit de corps. Nowadays women and men of all ages are only too willing to bare all for Laguna. Indeed, a 1969 nude volunteer named Cathe Mennen is enshrined as a heroine of the pageant. While she posed in a statuary group of Pygmalion and Galatea, a pigeon mistook her for the real thing and attempted a landing. Slipping on her gooey body makeup, the bird dug in its claws and drew blood. Mennen remained as immobile as her bronze original, earning a standing ovation.

Though it is now the centerpiece of the Festival of Arts, the pageant started almost as an afterthought. The festival itself was launched in 1932 to publicize the work of Depression-hit Laguna artists. A year later, Painter John Hinchman hit on the idea of staging tableaux vivants, similar to the scenes mounted on Sundays in some Victorian parlors. The "stage" was a roped-off section of a street. As Salome holding the severed head of John the Baptist, Margo Goddard, now 71, became the pageant's first nude in 1936 but swore she would never pose again after the organizers forgot to build her a dressing room. "I had to hide behind a neighbor's garage," she recalls. "The stagehands kept running over to peek."

As the show has grown slicker, Director Eytchison points out, "we've done Matisse and Picasso. Still, after you've tried it, you have to ask yourself what the point of the whole pageant is. After all,, pur purpose is to provide an enjoyable evening of theater." While many works of art meet Laguna's requirements in terms of style and content, they prove technically impossible to reproduce. For example, Eytchison has found that Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings have too much distance between figures in foreground and background for realistic reproduction: "In order to do a cancan scene and have real women recreating the dancers, the absinthe drinker in the foreground would have to be eight feet tall." The posers, who are picked from more than 1,000 applicants at open casting calls, are chosen not only on the basis of looks but because they are the right height to fit a specific tableau.

Lighting is the vital element in main-taming the illusion. Full-time Technical Director Carl Callaway, who has spent 38 of his 48 years working on the pageant, has mastered the art of creating an impression of flatness, the opposite of most canvas artists' aim. A brawny, cigar-chomping character who doubles as carpenter, electrician, painter and engineer, Callaway faces the major problem of lighting a show that is held after dark in a variety of weather conditions.

Lagunatics' year-after-year involvement in the festival is only partially explicable by the town's lack of night life. The volunteers, from the mostly middle-aged women who do the men's makeup (their yellow T shirts read: WE KNOW WHERE TO PUT IT) to the lowliest errand boys, are plainly basking in the glory of Laguna's premiere event. Says Judy Stanton, 46, who for 13 years has rushed 50 miles from her nursing job in Downey to take part in the pageant: "I never get sick of it. There are new pictures every year. You see old friends and meet new people." Volunteer Jackie Ludlum, 46, agrees: "It's the ultimate in community involvement. You always hear how people today lack a real sense of commitment. Well, here we are all in it together, committed to doing something that is really first class."

-- By Michael Demarest. Reported by Alessandra Stanley /Laguna Beach

With reporting by Alessandra Stanley

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.