Review : Festival Embraces the Real and Imagined : Pageant Is True to Itself: Popular and Inoffensive

The Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters, which opened Thursday night in Laguna Beach, is a study in inoffensiveness.

Among 24 tableaux vivant, there are pretty enough renditions of J. F Millet’s “Buckwheat Harvest, Summer,” Franz A. Bischoff’s “Fishing at Laguna” and John Singer Sargent’s “The Sketchers.”

In a slight departure from the festival’s tradition of using living individuals, a “Sicilian Puppet Opera” has people imitating puppets, which is strangely ineffective compared to puppets imitating people.

The girl who Thursday night played the standing blonde with her hand on her hip in the Laguna rendition of painter John Sloan’s “Sunday, Woman Drying Their Hair,” was prettier than Sloan’s model. But Sloan--who clearly painted a plain-faced, hard-working daughter of the tenements--is not around to complain. So why should we? Despite such deviations, the lights came up again and again on some pretty pictures.

If anything, the pageant’s 54th edition is too good an imitation of itself. One left the two-hour preview night Thursday fantasizing--yearning perhaps--about a summer in which the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters might really make news--something it really hasn’t done for years.

What if it were to mount a shocking tableau vivant of Picasso’s “Guernica,” his excoriation of war recreated complete with dive-bombers swinging from the roof of the Irvine Bowl? Newsweek would spread the festival over its cover. TV certainly would be there.

Or perhaps it could do a living tableaux of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Imagine Munch’s figure--a man with hands pressed to his head to contain his madness--staring out at the serene audience in the 2,662-seat Irvine Bowl. Would they stop eating their popcorn? Would they applaud?

Certainly, there was vigorous applause at the press preview of the 24 staged recreations of masterpieces, minor pieces and pictorial curiosities included in the 54th annual pageant that runs through Aug. 30.

It remains an exceptionally popular event, one that displays great effort and skill in the use of live people to recreate works of art. And there is diversity: this year’s offerings ranged from five vintage Orange County orange crate labels to Winslow Homer’s boys at play in “Snap the Whip” (looking like a scene out of “Tom Sawyer”) to the quasi-decadent femme fatales by the artist Erte.

But where is the great number of art works conceived to provoke, perplex, infuriate and transform the viewer, whose works could provide some new life that pageant officials themselves say they seek?

John Rayment, president of the board that operates the pageant, recently told The Times that he was concerned about a slip in ticket sales for the pageant, citing competition from the Performing Arts Center and local amusement parks. At one time, the pageant’s six-week run was sold out months in advance, but since 1984, many performances have not been sellouts, Rayment said.

Further, pageant director Glen Eytchison has said he has been looking for ways to enliven the show’s old format.

While some elitists may snicker at the pageant’s whole concept, the idea of pictures staged with living people is neither dated nor discredited. One of the most critically praised Broadway musicals of the 1980s was Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday In The Park With George,” based on a tableau of Georges Seurat’s painting by that name.

Another theater piece that wowed critics recently was choreographer Martha Clarke’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” which carefully distilled the spirit of the original work by Hieronymus Bosch. But to date, the creative, thought-provoking approach that Sondheim and Clarke take to the past is a world removed from the Laguna event.

Nevertheless, an attentive hush fell over the crowd when the lights went up on Giovanni della Robbia’s portrayal of “The Annunciation,” and plenty of delighted exclamations greeted the book illustrations of Cicely Barker, featuring, of course, live children.

Clearly, the pageant managers know no limits in their search for works that will charm and amuse. They trained their cast to mimic a Dresden Porcelain portrayal of an 18th Century family making chamber music; they have given new life to Harriet Whitney Frishmuth’s sculpture, “The Dancers” and even used breathing bodies to portray figures on folksy old weather vanes.

Eventually, though, the pageant’s researchers will bump into the Great Wall of Kitsch; they’ll simply run out of the sweet stuff or at least the best of it.