Anyone who has ever dreamed of visiting a large number of California’s art museums in a single trip is in luck this summer.
“Gold Coast: Treasures of California,” this year’s theme for the annual Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, offers a rich overview of the state’s significant museums, such as the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, destinations like Hearst Castle in San Simeon, and one of the newer additions, the Hilbert Museum of California Art gracing the campus of Chapman University — all in a span of roughly 90 minutes.
Pageant Director Diane Challis Davy and her volunteer researchers selected 12 museums, along with several art sites within driving distance from the pageant, culling works intriguing enough to be transformed into the show’s signature tableaux vivants, or living pictures.
This year, it seems that Challis Davy and her crew have taken a somewhat different approach to the show: Instead of cleaving almost exclusively to the formula of turning figurative paintings, such as “Recreation” (1857) by Jerome Thompson (at the De Young Museum in San Francisco), into living pictures, they added theatrical stage scenes featuring people visiting a museum and looking at still paintings.
Susan Hoehn’s 2024 works “Blue Dog” (at the Broad) and “The Artist at LACMA” exemplify this new trend, which thus allows subjective or abstract paintings to be shown in a pageant setting. (Hoehn’s paintings are also included in this year’s Festival of Arts, Booth 104.)
Previously, for example, there were stage replications of fashion show audiences or other smaller scenes involving the acting out of situations.
This time, the audience gets the vicarious thrill of dancing at Hearst Castle or sauntering through the museums influenced by a young woman armed with a cellphone.
The Hearst Castle segment features the opulent residence in several configurations. Designed by architect Julia Morgan, the castle has a theater showing film clips of William Randolph Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies; lavish rooms filled with sculptures and urns from ancient Greece and Rome; and a swimming pool dazzling with its mosaics.
Staged scenes of ballroom fetes with fashionably attired real dancers keep audience imaginations connected to past and present.
Among recreations of sculptures, as sculptures vivants if you will, there are several standouts, with the volunteers enacting figures displaying remarkable acrobatic skill.
“Mechanics Monument,” by Douglas Tilden (in San Francisco), comes to mind as does the majestic “El Cid Campeador,” by Anna Hyatt Huntington (at Balboa Park, San Diego).
Then again, there is the graceful 1789 “Mantel Clock,” by Pierre-Philippe Thomire (at the Getty), that prompts the imagination back to an era when keeping time might have been a gentler process than today’s cacophony of cellphones.
In a different vein, the charming Indian Chess Set (at the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) can make one forget that chess is a war game.
After intermission, the show veers into Southern California to, somewhat puzzlingly, a statue of Helena Modjeska, a Polish emigree better known for her Shakespearean acting than for making art.
But subsequent drawings reveal that she loved to invent fairy tales for children of friends and family members and accompany them with intricate pen and ink and color illustrations. Ghosts and fairies and creatures of her own invention abounded in the pageant.
Then it was on to the beach culture. Not surprisingly, the segment emphasizes surfers and water enthusiasts in the form of Bill Limebrook’s sculptures of surfer Phil Edwards, surfing acrobats Barrie and Steve Boehne, and surf and sailing pioneer Hobie Alter in “Hobie Riding the Wave of Success.”
A giant mosaic replica of the movie poster for “The Endless Summer” underscores the legends. Built by local mosaic artist Mia Tavonatti, the piece graces Waterman’s Plaza in Dana Point.
Local audiences can transpose themselves a couple of blocks down from the pageant into the Marine Room, a once notorious biker bar turned family friendly pub, replete, under the brush of painter Bradford J. Salamon, with a visiting dog, billiards players and a cat.
Brought to life here, the painting is part of the Festival of Arts Permanent Collection.
Salamon, a former FoA exhibitor, created more local scenes, like “Monday at the Crab Cooker” and “Seal Beach Nighthawks.” Both are in the Hilbert collection.
Altogether the show features six paintings from the Hilbert Museum, established in 2022.
The pageant ends with Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” a traditional closing to the show.
“Gold Coast: Treasures of California” nightly through Aug. 29. Tickets start at $47. Visit foapom.com for more information.
Laguna Woods resident takes part in third pageant
By Daniella Walsh
Correspondent
When the Pageant of the Masters announced auditions in January for its “Gold Coast: Treasures of California” production, Laguna Woods resident Reggie White decided to give it another shot.
After all, he had taken part in the pageant for two seasons already.
Last year, White appeared in Daniele Tamagni’s photograph “The Playboys of Bacongo,” part of the pageant show “À La Mode: The Art of Fashion.”
“I posed the entire summer last year and was also an alternate,” White said in an interview. “I had to stand still a lot.”
In early June, the pageant notified him that he was in the stage cast again.
“I get to walk through a simulated museum in the (California) Museum Suite,” he said. “This year, I am only in costume with no makeup, which is simpler than last year. I did several walk-through rehearsals and two in costume.”
White explained that there are two teams of actors – a blue team and a green team, which perform in alternating weeks. Altogether he performs for one month of the season, though he did not perform on opening night.
White taught himself to stand still for 90 seconds – the time required of the cast members to pose in the tableaux vivants.
“You have to freeze,” he said. “Some people can’t do that,”
In 2022, White was accepted for the pageant show “Wonderful World,” celebrating global culture.
“The stage piece was about holy rollers. It was a long, 15-minute piece, and I was singing in it,” he recalled. “Singing was easy. I sing in church. I learned the lyrics and really enjoyed myself.”
Altogether the pageant involves more than 500 volunteers who contribute more than 60,000 hours to the seasonal production.
“As long as they’ll have me, I’ll come,” White said. “Everyone should experience the pageant at least once.”