COMMENTARY : An Easterner’s View of ‘Pageant of Masters’

If I were to tell a friend back home in New York that I had just spent a wonderful night in the theater where none of the actors on stage moved an inch or spoke a single word, they would probably be puzzled. That’s because an evening of tableaux vivants such as Laguna Beach’s “Pageant of the Masters” is a rarity everywhere except in Southern California, where it has been a yearly tradition since 1933.

The art of tableaux vivants (French for “living paintings”), which involves the re-creation of works of art, usually famous paintings or drawings, in three dimensions with appropriately costumed live people assuming the poses of people portrayed in the painting, has a longer history than the Laguna pageant.

My introduction to the concept of tableaux vivants came in two favorite novels, “Time and Again” by Jack Finney, in which the hero travels back in time from 1980 to 1880, and “Mapp and Lucia,” the 1931 E. F. Benson novel filmed recently for television by the BBC.

Although most of the crew and cast of “Pageant of the Masters” are unpaid volunteers, the presentation, surprisingly, does not seem amateurish. And the outdoor theater setting almost makes one feel surrounded by a beautiful painting of the Laguna hills.

In the roughly two hours, in which the cast meticulously reproduces 23 works of art, one sees tableaux ranging from the very celebrated (Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”) to the obscure (“Thanksgiving” by Doris Lee). The evening’s witty score with composer Richard Henn, conducting the fine 27-piece orchestra enhances the still scenes, narrated by the familiar voice of Tony the Tiger (Thurl Ravenscroft).

Amazingly, the actors hold their poses perfectly still--an eye might have blinked once or twice, but who would swear to it?

While the presentation of tableaux in its pure form may be a nearly extinct type of entertainment, its influence can be found in several other contemporary media.

Herbert Ross’s film version of “Pennies From Heaven” includes re-creations of several Depression-era paintings, a particularly memorable one being the zoom shot of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” in which we discover Bernadette Peters and Steve Martin sitting at the coffee shop counter. Terry Gilliam’s film “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” includes a re-creation of Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” with actress Uma Thurman as Venus emerging from a giant clamshell.

Perhaps the most obvious recent work with ties to tableaux vivants is the James Lapine-Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” for which I was a rehearsal pianist.

The entire first act examines Georges Seurat’s painting, “Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte,” imagining life stories for the anonymous people portrayed in this Pointilliste masterpiece. The finale of the first act is a breathtaking coup de theatre in which Seurat, having previously observed each person individually, arranges these diverse characters into a magnificent singing tableau, filling the entire width and depth of the stage. The second act opens with the song “It’s Hot Up Here,” during which the frozen characters in the painting complain about how they are portrayed and about the boredom of being eternally fixed in one position.

The great fun of the tableaux in Laguna lies in seeing the paintings’ characters come to life. Particularly notable is the tableau of Maurice Denis’s “Game of Badminton,” assembled in full view of the audience. Watching the actors step into place, adjust their costumes, and assume their poses makes seeing the final image more exciting. One almost wished all had been done that way. Instead, I found myself hoping an actor would twitch, or that a breeze would ruffle a costume.

The performances seem so perfectly controlled that one could hardly tell they are not just two-dimensional paintings. Too bad that the pageant doesn’t offer a more contemporary take on this form of entertainment, that we don’t learn anything more about the paintings than what we would see in a museum. Unfortunately, the pageant is more a re-creative art than a creative one.

And that may be the point of the evening, but unless one is sitting very close, the experience can be a little frustrating. (The pageant continues through Aug. 26.)

Sperling is conducting “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. He was a rehearsal pianist and member of the orchestra for the Broadway production of “Sunday in the Park With George.” He has conducted “Les Miserables” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” on Broadway.