Lending a Hand at a Masterful Arts Pageant

There’s always a moment on closing night when the audience feels that something enchanted is coming to an end.

This is the last night of the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna.

Hundreds of thousands have seen the pageant since it began in 1933. Historians agree that such tableaus vivant had their beginnings centuries ago as Nativity scenes.

At Laguna, the subjects may be paintings--a famous re-enactment was of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”--or living replications of sculptures, drawings, serigraphs, photographs or ceramics.

Among the 36 scenes this year were “Art of the Maya,” a re-enactment of a 1,400-year-old Mayan frieze, and a replication of a porcelain sculpture of a Chinese emperor. I was lucky enough to have been backstage on closing night because my friend Marcee Sullivan, a volunteer, wangled me a chair in an out-of-the-way corner.

Fifteen volunteers are on hand every evening to help the performers (also volunteers) into their costumes and wigs.

The costumes are made of unbleached muslin, which is painted and varnished so as to be motionless in the tableaus. Velcro is used on the costumes to fasten the cast members onto the sets.

There are two full casts, and each has its own set of dressers, wigs and makeup people. There are 150 people in each cast and a total of 400 volunteers. Marcee says cast members include doctors, lawyers, stock brokers and every other kind of worker.

Watching from backstage is interesting. Each cast member comes in and announces his or her number and assignment, such as “Viking, No. 4.”

Three platforms, each with a scene, are readied at once to be turned onto the stage. The actors have to go onto the sets in total darkness so that the audience does not see them moving before the scene is set.

Seeing the figures up close in the sets makes the re-enactments seem almost unbelievable. The men, women and children are totally immobile, and the scenery is magically close to the appearance of the original artworks.

Many children play the parts of adults because there’s not room for full-size people in all the scenes. Each cast member must be the right size to realistically reproduce the pictures while still being large enough to be seen from the back row of the amphitheater.

The background artists, Leslie Turnbell and David Rymar, agree that copying the work of so many artists from many countries and over many centuries is exacting. They follow brush stroke by brush stroke. Acrylics are used because oil paints would reflect the stage lights.

Clarice Mondeel, who has a graduate degree in costume design from Humbolt State University, has been a headdress maker with the Pageant of the Masters for five years. This year she worked on the Mayan masks in the frieze.

The masks are made of molded clay and large enough to engulf the whole head. For the tableau of Millet’s painting “The Gleaners,” young women wore Dutch bonnets.

Each character is worked on by the make-up people. I was fortunate to watch the work on the Chinese emperor, based on a 226-year-old porcelain sculpture that includes the emperor with three little boys, one of whom has an elaborate headdress. The emperor was played by 14-year-old Nicole Parker.

Before the lights went out for the scene change, a 5-year-old boy who played one of the boys with the emperor said to me: “I think I should hold your hand just a little while after it’s dark.”

I thought that if I were 5 and groping among the sets in the dark, I’d certainly have had the same idea.