ART / Cathy Curtis : ‘Manet’ in Laguna Paints Accurate Picture of the Artist’s History.

Anyone who has winced at the warmed-over cliches accompanying depictions of famous-name art in Laguna Beach’s annual Pageant of the Masters might have major doubts regarding “Manet,” the Laguna Playhouse’s new musical that also incorporates “living pictures” in relating the life and times of 19th-Century painter Edouard Manet.

Happily, such doubts are unwarranted. Whatever musical and dramatic shortcomings “Manet” may have, the art-history information is conveyed with surprising accuracy. Rather than settle for a fantasy image of the artist’s life in Gay Paree, author Mark Turnbull has focused the play firmly on Manet’s actual relationship to his work and public.

The artist himself comes across as the intriguingly double-sided personality he was, at once the rebel and the conformist.

A socialist, Manet remained close to his upper-middle-class family and continued to indulge in a dandified mode of dress. (In the musical, Manet’s penchant for kid gloves is a running joke.) Passionately hoping for acceptance by the official salon, the only recognized exhibition venue for new work (“What’s nice is/Think of the prizes!” his musical persona sings), he was also tickled by the idea of shocking its patrons.

The ironies continued. He was excluded from the International Exhibition in Paris in 1867 (he held a private show of his works instead) and endured official censure of his strangely unheroic painting of hot-off-the-press national news, “The Execution of Emperor Maximilian.” But 15 years later, when a supporter became French minister of art, he was awarded the biggest prize the Establishment had to offer: the Legion d’Honneur.

The musical manages to convey all this and quite a bit more--even such matters as the plight of the 19th-Century woman artist--thanks to hard-working lyrics that compress information into simple rhymes.

At the same time, a constant swirl of historical characters--including Manet’s nemesis, Emperor Napoleon III, who is portrayed as a shallow opportunist singing inanely about his love for his uniform--keep the bigger picture of life under France’s Second Empire in view.

The events on stage are shaped mainly by the conflicting opinions of the various groups in contact with Manet. The audience meets the growing ranks of bourgeois society (“Money to squander and something to prove/We’re on the move”); the tight ranks of painters belonging to the all-important French Academy and the outrageously vituperative critics of the day (“We keep culture on the go/By printing all the things we know”).

Also on the scene are the artist’s key supporters, led by visionary poet and critic Charles Baudelaire and feisty novelist-and-critic Emile Zola, and a ragtag bunch of younger painters whose work ultimately became too unconventional for Manet’s tastes.

The targets of these people’s scorn and praise were paintings firmly grounded in the styles of such Old Masters as Titian, Velasquez and Franz Hals. But while Manet admired their broad, free brush strokes, he wanted to strip away the allegorical, emotional and even structural aspects basic to their work.

Interested in the intrinsic qualities of paint applied to canvas, he exposed as needless falderal the elaborate techniques that had come to constitute a well-made painting.

At the same time, he offered a clear-eyed, unembellished look at the people of his own time. (In the musical, his character sings, “A person please/Not a Greek frieze/Don’t stand like Hercules!/Can’t you be natural?”)

His contemporaries, however, thought his work suffered from sloppy treatment of perspective and negligence in the modeling of figures, which often look flat rather than “properly” three-dimensional. In addition, Manet’s dispassionate view of his subjects as simply grist for the brush meant that his work lacked the high-toned or sentimental outlook viewers of the day expected.

In “Dejeuner sur L’Herbe” (“Luncheon on the Grass”) for example--one of six works illustrated in the musical with live models in “Pageant of the Masters” style--a nude woman picnicking in a park with a couple of fully dressed men stares out boldly at the viewer. (Annoyingly, this painting is reproduced backward in the tableau, with the nude sitting on the left rather than on the right.)

The basic idea comes from Renaissance works such as Giorgione’s “Concert Champetre,” in which two men relax outdoors with two plump nudes as company. These dreamy women have always been seen as allegorical figures.

But Manet’s painting caused a scandal when it was shown in 1863 in the Salon des Refusees (a rebel exhibit formed by artists whose work was refused by the official salon). The very idea of dressing the men in up-to-date clothes and having the nude stare boldly out of the canvas removed such a scene from the airy sphere of ideas and sent it crashing down into the realm of pornography. What else could a scene like this represent but some courtesan lounging in the buff with a couple of clients! It was assuredly not the sort of thing anyone would want in a decent home.

Manet, who kept hoping people would stop being so mystified by what he was doing, laments: “Everybody wants to say/’I get it’ “--a refrain that continues to echo wherever contemporary art is shown.

His forward-looking view had its limits, however, which the musical dramatizes with a hummable song called “The Light on the Land.” Several artists--Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and others--had begun painting outdoors to pin down the exact qualities of objects seen in sunlight. Manet (“I am not an Impressionist!”) refused to follow them.

In a recent theater column, Times staff writer Jan Herman pointed out major problems with “Manet’s” dramatic focus (not enough is made of the artist’s private life) and musical weaknesses.

Some visual details also seem jarring, though it would scarcely take a major overhaul to fix them. The barrage of slides projected on the left and right margins of the stage come in a confusing assortment of sizes (corresponding to the vagaries of slide photography rather than the actual size of the paintings); some of the colors look wildly off key.

The way these slides are projected also lacks finesse. Too often the audience is staring at hugely enlarged details of a canvas washed out by the stage lighting or at a bunch of slides by various artists that do not seem to have direct relevance to what a particular character is saying.

Despite its problems, the play has a drive and freshness about it that bodes well for its future life on the regional circuit. A statement by Manet himself seems apropos: “The artist does not say today, ‘Come and see faultless work,’ but ‘Come and see sincere work.’ ”

The sincerity of “Manet” is never in question.

The Laguna Playhouse’s production of Mark Turnbull’s “Manet” continues through June 12 at the Moulton Theatre, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, in Laguna Beach. Performances are at 8 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $14 to $16. For information, call (714) 494-8021 or 494-0743, Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m.