THEATER AND FILM : 1988 Pageant of Masters Predictably Posed for Success

The suspense is over. The batting order has been picked for next summer’s Pageant of the Masters, a stage spectacle built on one peculiarity: people posing as art.

After months of searching through art periodicals, U.S. museums and European art meccas, the pageant board in Laguna Beach has settled on its 25-tableaux show July 8 to Aug. 28 at Laguna Beach’s Irvine Bowl. Resurrected are such box office heavy hitters as Norman Rockwell, Henri Matisse, Currier & Ives and that schoolchild favorite, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” along with the pageant’s ever-popular finale, the Leonard da Vinci “Last Supper.”

Also offered are the usual eye-sweeping, multistage scenes--this time people posing as delicate figurines from imperial China and as sculpted dancers from “Scheherazade,” as performed by the legendary Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev.

No doubt, detractors will again moan. To these critics, the new lineup contains no surprises, just the same kitschy combination that has been the pageant’s wont since 1933, when producers unveiled their first “Mona Lisa.”

No doubt, the pageant’s faithful--and there are literally thousands of them--sound pained by such skepticism, and argue that in an era of all kinds of societal upheaval, what’s wrong with something as soothing and predictable as the Pageant of the Masters.

If you have kept tabs on recent pageants, you’ll notice something missing from the 1988 lineup: no live-movement sequences. Last summer the pageant presented an Italian puppet show sequence that used such movement for the first time in pageant history.

Apparently some of the pageant Old Guard were aghast.

“There were a lot of the longtime patrons who didn’t like that at all,” said David Young, who heads the pageant board’s tableaux selection committee. “They weren’t too crazy about those orange crates (label art) either.”

“Next year, we’re more back on the track,” said Young of the 1988 edition, which is to cost about $780,000, the highest yet. “It’s more traditional in style, even though there aren’t very many repeats. I’d say next year is a happy medium.”

You can also bet that such a “medium” doesn’t include abstract works.”

“People who say we should be doing something more daring, like the later Picasso or Dali, simply don’t understand our limits when it comes to size of stage and how far we can stretch human proportions,” Young said.

“These (abstract) works are certainly masterworks, but if we can’t recapture them truthfully and authentically on our stage--if we do only a half-baked job--it would be absurd to try that,” he said.

The correct format, as pageant leaders view it, has been made quite clear. It was honed in the 1930s with the Gainsboroughs, Rembrandts, Whistlers and Renoirs and later with the three-dimensional classics from Egyptian diggings, Grecian and Asian temples, European courts amd medieval monasteries.

This unobtrusive, middle-America format became all but untouchable by the mid-1960s, when the pageant had achieved international media attention and was hailed as the only commercial show of its kind in the world. (The only rival is a younger, far smaller version in American Fork, Utah.)

The tried-and-true approach has also been a box office bonanza for the pageant’s nonprofit operators (who also present the Festival of Arts exhibition). Last summer, officials said, the entire presented in the 2,662-seat Irvine Bowl was sold out for the 21st straight year.

“We’re not about to make any drastic changes,” said board president John Rayment. “Why should we tamper with success? OK, we might experiment a bit, but basically why rock the boat when you have this track record?”

And board members said they have found a capable guardian of the pageant in Glen Eytchison, the former South Coast Repertory music associate who has been the pageant’s artistic boss since 1979.

“You have to know the demographics of your audience,” said Eytchison. “What plays in New York or L.A. wouldn’t play here. It’s as simple as that.”

Eytchison admitted, though, that he has embellished the old format with his own “touches here and there”: more lively, contemporary works; quicker pace in scene changes; more extensive use of original music scoring (by Richard Henn); more spectacular effects in major set pieces.

And last year, as an innovation, he staged his version of the Sicilian Puppet Opera Theatre’s medieval tale of knights, damsels and wizards--complete with swordplay and other puppet-like movements.

“The reaction was mixed,” he admitted. “But a lot of people did like it. We didn’t do it just for the effect. We did it because it was a valid form of art that we were reproducing, not a gimmick.”

Meanwhile, Eytchison and his 24-member research group are still poring over art histories on several 1988 sequences, including the original staging of Diaghilev’s “Scheherazade” production.

The team is also doing spadework on the 1989 pageant, which is to include a tribute to the Orange County Centennial--and, if all goes well, another live-movement sequence, this time with figures in mechanical clocks.

Rayment said: “I was in Prague last year and saw these terrific clockworks in the town square. You know, the kind in a town hall type building, with little figures coming out to ring the clock. I thought this would make for an exciting pageant scene.”

Eytchison is just as taken by the mechanical clock concept and had hoped to finish research and the technical planning in time for consideration as a 1988 tableau.

“We think it will eventually work and be a possible addition two years from now,” Eytchison said. “Right now, the whole thing is still unwieldy for us. We’re still researching how to get it down to proper scale.”

“We figured if we did it now,” he laughed, “it would be four stories high.”

Auditions for pageant tableaux volunteers will be held 7-9 p.m. on Jan. 9 and 1-4 p.m. on Jan. 10 at the Irvine Bowl. Needed are 270 posers with a particular requirement: that they can stand or sit still for 90 seconds at a time. Call (714) 494-3663.