The Show Must Stay Put

The Festival of the Arts and its offbeat hit show, the Pageant of the Masters, have staged a post-curtain encore by signing a lease to stay in Laguna Beach for at least 40 years. That outcome should have been obvious from the start, but it took a dramatic sideshow and an eleventh-hour rescue effort to keep the pageant from moving after 70 years in the same town.

Almost everyone is entitled to share the blame for the nasty mini-fiasco that engulfed the festival for a year. The city was a recalcitrant negotiator on the festival’s new lease, reluctant to make needed improvements to the aging site. The festival board, led by a Mission Viejo mayor, had its own grandiose agenda to take its show on the road, at least down to San Clemente. Such a move would have erased the quirky community charm of the pageant, in which people pose as works of art, complete with live orchestral accompaniment.

San Clemente could have been a better civic neighbor in the dispute. Instead of waiting for the city and festival to sort out their differences -- or call it quits -- the larger southern neighbor played the spoiler, insinuating itself into ongoing negotiations with offers of a gigantic year-round site and an upscale restaurant.

It was more than a matter of civic pride. The pageant, which sells out its eight-week run each summer, brings in tourists who spend millions of dollars on shopping, food and hotels.

Strangest of all was an early ruling by an Orange County Superior Court judge, whose interpretation of the festival’s incorporation papers defied common sense. Those papers state that the annual summer event must take place “in or about the city of Laguna Beach.” The judge used a broad -- even sprawling -- definition of “community” to decide that San Clemente was “in or about” Laguna Beach. Even he admitted that when those words were written, they were meant to keep the event within the city’s sphere, which included unincorporated areas in Laguna Canyon and South Laguna.

The festival is such a Laguna fixture that its own foundation voted to stay in the city, no matter where the artists ended up going, and keep the festival’s $2.7 million in holdings there as well.

Laguna Beach residents were only slightly less vehement about the festival than they were about wanting to kill the El Toro airport plan. And like the airport, the festival’s impending move south came to such a sudden stop, with one election, that it felt like an anticlimax.

The festival members voted to recall most of the board. The pageant stayed. And now, with the lease signed, it will stay at least a few decades more. Too bad they can’t write the history of mismanaged rent negotiations into the lease. It could save everyone a lot of trouble in 40 years.