Say it again, Omar

The hair is of biblical proportions, long and silvery, straight out of “The Ten Commandments”; the famous eyes scanning the script are Dr. Zhivago’s. But the voice, softly evoking Egypt in a Beverly Hills hotel lobby, is unmistakably Omar Sharif’s, and he’s preparing for a new role, this one entirely off-screen.

With just days to go before the L.A. opening of “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” Sharif was in town to lend his voice to a countryman, the boy king. In a few hours, he would head to a Santa Monica studio to record the English-language version of the museum audio guide for Tut.

But first: Does Mr. Sharif know that when Tut’s treasures last came to the U.S., in the 1970s, the now-deceased Orson Welles recorded an audio guide for that show?

The actor, 73, groaned. “I can’t compete with that,” he joked.

Since Tut II opened June 16, exhibition organizers say 60% to 65% of visitors -- twice the usual rate -- to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have plunked down $6, on top of the average $20 exhibition ticket price, to rent the guide and hear the Egyptian actor lead them through the treasures of the tombs.

What they get, at Tut and most shows that offer a guide, is far removed from the straightforward recordings of the past. Changing expectations on the part of gallery-goers primed by a media-saturated society are prompting museums to demand Hollywood-style production values coupled with star power.

If you can watch a movie on your phone and tote your entire music library in an iPod, why should your audio guide be any less entertaining? And who better than a personality -- recognizable, quirky or just cool -- to meet the demands of an audience used to holding state-of-the-art entertainment, quite literally, in the palm of its hand?

“I think audio tours are much more sophisticated than they were even 10 years ago,” said Bradley Klein, creative director of Acoustiguide Inc., a New York-based producer of museum and other audio guides and tours. “They grew out of gallery lectures, where you have a curator speaking, and it can come off rather dry. The goal for us now is to present a rich mix of voices that will be more entertaining and have a higher production value.”

In suitable voice

These days, guides are incorporating not only narration but unscripted interviews, archival recordings, poetry, music and, in a few cases, images.

Jane Burton, curator of interpretation for the Tate Modern in London, said: “It has partly to do with public expectation -- there are increases in what we expect on arts programming on TV, for instance. It’s a reflection of changing views on the history of art.”

Although anonymous voice actors are paid for their services, even the biggest stars generally donate their time -- otherwise most nonprofit museums couldn’t afford them.

Jane Burrell, assistant vice president for education at LACMA, said that although it varies with each exhibition, the museum looks for “the voice of someone who is connected in some way, either as a collector, someone who is very interested in that area, or someone who speaks for that community.”

The day after Sharif’s recording session for Tut, another celebrity recorded the script for the show in Spanish: Jorge Ramos, a Miami-based evening news co-anchor for Univision Communications, the Spanish-language network. (Ramos is seen at 6:30 p.m. on KMEX-TV Channel 34 in Los Angeles.) Ramos has no particular connection with Tut, but he believes he has the right voice for the diverse Spanish-speaking communities in the cities where Tut II will tour -- Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Chicago; and Philadelphia, after the L.A. run ends Nov. 15. The guide is being offered in English and Spanish only; the Sharif and Ramos versions will travel with the show.

“Latinos are very sensitive to different accents,” Ramos said from Miami, where he recorded. “I sort of lost my Mexican accent, and that’s what they were looking for in this case -- some sort of neutral accent that could be understood on both coasts and in different Hispanic communities: Puerto Ricans on the East Coast, Cubans in Fort Lauderdale and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles.”

Sharif’s connection to Tut II is more personal: Besides being a longtime promoter of his nation’s culture, he is a friend of Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief antiquities official and the person primarily responsible for the return tour of Tut’s artifacts.

It seemed only natural, Sharif said, that just after playing Jethro in “The Ten Commandments” -- a big-budget ABC miniseries to air next season -- he would volunteer to read about 58 pages of Tut text -- and agonize over the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian names: “Tutankhamun’s wife’s name was Ankhesenamun [onk-sen-a-MOON], and it’s in there a few times,” he said, eyebrows raised in mock horror.

Not to worry. Larry Moss, a Santa Monica acting coach and veteran voice-over artist, visited the Tut exhibition and gave Sharif an A for his audio. “He has a very intimate connection: ‘Come, I am going to give you a personal tour,’ ” Moss said by telephone, lapsing into an uncanny imitation of Sharif’s hushed tone.

A range of possibilities

Other LACMA guides do a similar star turn. Edward James Olmos was the voice of the 1991 Mexican art exhibition “The Splendors of Thirty Centuries” and Peter Coyote spoke for “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” also in 1991. Art aficionado Dustin Hoffman narrated 1998’s “Picasso: Masterworks From the Museum of Modern Art.”

Steve Martin, a collector, former member of LACMA’s Board of Trustees and author of the play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” narrated for another Picasso exhibition, in 1996 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

At L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Suzanne Isken, director of education, said for its 2003 exhibition “Frank O. Gehry: Work in Progress,” MOCA tried to get the architect’s good friend Brad Pitt to narrate but it “didn’t pan out,” so they used an anonymous actor. They couldn’t get Gehry for his part either, and so they borrowed from a Charlie Rose interview with him.

For MOCA’s popular 2002 Andy Warhol retrospective, Warhol contemporary Dennis Hopper contributed his recollections to the script.

John Astin, who portrayed Edgar Allan Poe in a one-man show, recorded Poe’s “The Raven” for the Baltimore Museum of Art’s 2003 exhibition “Haunting Visions of Poe: Illustrations by Manet, Matisse and Gaugin.”

Burton, the Tate curator, said it is not just actors but also other well-known people who are in demand for audio guides. Whenever possible, Tate Modern, for example, uses the voices of the contemporary artists whose work the museum exhibits, rather than celebrity actors. Bruce Nauman, Damien Hirst and David Hockney all have recorded guides to their work.

“I think it brings the art to life to some extent and reminds you that these are not dusty old artifacts -- there are people and ideas and opinions behind them,” Burton said.

At the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, longtime board member Tom Brokaw gives the introduction to the museum’s general tour.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art called upon Jill DeVonyar, the dancer and dance scholar, for the guide to “Degas and the Dance” in 2003. The Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth took a similar approach, choosing Hall of Fame jockey Chris McCarron to speak for the 2004 “Stubbs and the Horse” exhibition of paintings by George Stubbs. The jockey offered observations not only about riders but the mind-set of the horse.

To push the envelope, a handful of museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood, Tate Modern and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., are experimenting with multimedia visitor guides using PDAs, or personal digital assistants, that can feature video clips and “virtual tours” of galleries. “You might watch an animation of how Cubism works, starting from scratch building up a Cubist painting,” Burton said of the PDA-based guides.

The Getty Museum is offering a PDA-based guide to its exhibition “Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits,” at the museum through Aug. 28. The museum is also updating its GettyGuide, a multimedia information system. It will include a new hand-held guide to its permanent collection from which museum-goers can access the Getty’s Web-based research data, now available via computer on the website.

Tate Modern’s Burton said of that museum’s PDA-based guides: “We are obviously not trying to create mini-television programs that people are watching as they go through the galleries. I think we’ve been quite successful so far in building content that takes you back to the work in front of you.”

So far, museums supply the PDAs or other devices, but Tate Modern and others are also looking into creating audio that visitors could listen to by dialing a number on their own mobile phones.

According to Acoustiguide’s Klein, the fee most museums charge to use audio guides averages about $5. But in late June, MoMA, which took some heat last year for raising general admission from $12 to $20, announced that it will offer free use of its audio guides for the foreseeable future. Since July 1, the museum also has placed audio files from the guides on its website, www.moma.org/audio, where they can be listened to or downloaded onto MP-3 devices for free.

The MoMA-endorsed guides are not to be confused with a cheeky class project at Marymount Manhattan College in New York in which students, led by one professor David Gilbert, created unofficial MoMA guides with their own commentary and made them available as podcasts on the website www.mod.blogs.com/art_mobs/. The site invites MoMA visitors to submit their own material: “Help us hack the gallery experience, help us remix MoMA!” the Web page says.

In Las Vegas, resort mogul Steve Wynn uses his own voice on the guide to the Wynn Collection, the gallery at his Wynn Las Vegas hotel. Although he doesn’t charge for the guide, looking at the art will set you back $15. Wynn’s words have been translated into Italian, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese. Although Wynn doesn’t read the translations, he “personally selected the voices that he liked,” said Melissa Doumitt, director of the collection.

Eyeing the bottom line

The museum audio guide production business is dominated by two companies: Acoustiguide and Sausalito-based Antenna Audio, which produced the new Tut guide. Both have offices worldwide. But other companies, such as 15-year-old Sandpail Productions in Studio City, are also players. Among Sandpail’s recent projects was audio for the self-guided Walt Disney Concert Hall tour, narrated by John Lithgow and featuring interviews with architect Gehry, Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen and others connected with the hall.

Because guides are expensive to produce and distribute, museums carefully project and monitor the “take-up” or “pickup” rate -- that is, how many museum-goers will choose to use a particular one. Blockbuster exhibitions, with high attendance rates, are thus most likely to offer guides. They’re also where they’re most needed: It can be almost impossible to hear or follow a docent tour when hordes storm the galleries.

Because of the expense, MOCA decided to forgo the audio guide recording for “Basquiat,” which continues through Oct. 10. The guide, used earlier when the exhibition was at the Brooklyn Museum, features hip-hop star Wyclef Jean reading poems and text written by the artist.

Pamela Glintenkamp, Sandpail’s producer, said that although a celebrity voice can be a draw, pickup rate is influenced more by the exhibition subject. The average museum-goer, she said, is more attracted to, say, the romantic stories of Impressionist painters than to theories of minimalist art.

For Tut II, with the pickup rate double what’s typical, the museum has had to bring in additional player equipment, according to GolinHarris International, the PR firm handling publicity for Tut.

Even though some museums and audio guide producers reject the idea of using a museum director as narrator -- Acoustiguide’s Klein calls it the “voice of God” approach -- some die-hards, including the Met in New York, prefer the tradition. Met Director Philippe de Montebello even reads the script in several languages for different versions of the guide.

“Sometimes it is supplemented by a curator, or occasionally other people, but the director is the voice of our museum,” said Rika Burnham, associate museum educator. “He has a deep baritone, a beautiful voice.

“Some years ago, we had a group of high school summer interns participate in a study of what kind of voices they liked, and to our great surprise, they absolutely loved the voice of the director; they felt like he was the authority for the museum,” Burnham added. “When they went around to other museums, they were often confused about why these other people were doing it -- why does Steve Martin or the mayor know about art?”

*

Contact Diane Haithman at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.