California Psyche Bared : Preview of Annual Masters’ Pageant Intrigues World Press

Laguna Beach’s Pageant of the Masters seeks to show off world culture with theatrical presentations of paintings and sculpture.

But when international journalists attended the annual pageant preview Monday night, they found local culture far more interesting. The pageant’s seven-week run begins July 8, and officials are expecting the customary sellout crowds.

“It grows out of a need to deal with art from a society that is very new,” said Helga Oswald, a West German television producer who brought her crew to Laguna Beach to film portions of the 55th Pageant of the Masters production for a show entitled “I Love California.”

“It’s something you won’t find outside California,” she said. “It’s a different approach to art than European countries have. . . . We are trying to give Germans a different impression of California. We want to show them it is not so shallow.”’

There is at least one other pageant of living re-creations of famous artworks--the Utah Pageant of the Arts in American Fork, Utah. But that doesn’t diminish a whit the eccentricity of these events.

The Laguna Beach pageant, centerpiece of the annual Festival of Arts, offers a surprisingly comfortable blend of kitsch and class that Continentals find puzzling. In it, hundreds of volunteers under the direction of two dozen professionals stage larger-than-life re-creations of artworks, most of them well known, during a two-month run in Laguna Beach’s Irvine Bowl.

For Asako Torigoe, the West Coast correspondent for the Japanese television program “Weekend New York,” this fact alone was impressive.

“It’s amazing that so many people are volunteering” to participate in the pageant, she said. Her country has no equivalent festival, she said, because “Japanese people work too hard and they would not have time to volunteer for such a project.”

Pageant actors stand still within elaborate sets while costumed as figures in a painting or sculpture. There is musical accompaniment and narration by Thurl Ravenscroft, better known as the longtime voice of cereal mascot Tony the Tiger. Twenty-five works are scheduled to be portrayed in this year’s pageant. They range from Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” to Edmund Shumpert’s “Ultimate Challenge,” a 1971 bronze sculpture of a surfer that graces Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach.

While praised for the verisimilitude achieved by the technical staff, the pageant traditionally avoids the unsettling in its selection of subjects. Norman Rockwell is a favorite, Goya is not.

From the world of pop art, director Glen Eytchison recreated antique orange crate labels in last year’s show.

“I have to look at our audience and our demographics,” said Eytchison, the 33-year-old director, who has overseen the pageant since 1979. “These are normal folks who are out for the evening and want to enjoy themselves. They are not coming to experimental theater, they are not coming to off-Broadway. They are coming to the Pageant,” he said.

Privately, some staff members confessed that the presumedly conservative tastes of the pageant’s audience cause a degree of artistic frustration. But work in the Laguna Beach festival has its compensations.

“You can walk to the beach for lunch,” said one. “It’s a great location,” said another. “And theater jobs are hard to find.”