Welcome Changes in Ramona Pageant : Theater review: Its new director aims to make the outdoor extravaganza more historically accurate.

Dennis Anderson is the Ramona Pageant’s first new director since 1968, and he has made some changes in Southern California’s long-running rancho romance.

This is no Ramona Revolution. Based on Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel, the outdoor pageant still is set in 1850s California. As always, Ramona and Alessandro find their love initially thwarted by her Mexican guardian’s prejudice against Native Americans. Then their happy home is wrecked by the arrival of the Americano settlers from the East.

Anderson said he wants to make the pageant more historically authentic, particularly its depiction of Native Americans. He consulted some of the 47 Native American cast members (out of a total of 350). Some of them, he said, checked various details with their own tribal leaders.

Among the changes:

* Native Americans no longer mingle with the Mexicans at the big fiesta.

* The brown-fringed Pocahontas look is out of fashion among the Native American female characters--although it still thrives among the female ushers.

* The hillside settlement of the Native Americans is larger, with two new huts.

* In the scene where the infant daughter of Ramona and Alessandro is welcomed into the tribe, an old woman offers her blessing in Cahuila, a local Native American language, rather than Spanish. A Native American singer has been imported to make the music more authentic. A man from the local Soboba tribe burns sage in a shell, then sweeps the smoke with a feather. Not all the changes involve Native Americans. In the opening processional, rancho matriarch Senora Moreno and her son Felipe now ride a handsome Spanish carriage pulled by black horses. In earlier pageants, they walked with the masses. A Spanish juggler has joined the big crowd scenes, reflecting the presence of commedia actors in early California, Anderson said.

And in changes designed for effect, not authenticity, Alessandro now welcomes Ramona into his tribe with a headband. This scene’s dialogue has been rewritten, and its song is now a love duet, not an Alessandro solo.

Not all the changes are easy to spot on the pageant’s vast hillside canvas. But they’re welcome. If this sometimes stirring, sometimes corny event now more accurately delineates the cultures that made up this chapter of California history, so much the better.

* The Ramona Pageant, 27400 Ramona Bowl Road, Hemet. Saturdays, Sundays, 3:30 p.m. Ends May 7. $12-$19. (800) 645-4465, (213) 480-3232, (714) 740-2000, (619) 220-TIXS. Running time: 3 hours.