Pageant of the Masters was even weirder than I thought, and also insanely cool

Until a few nights ago, the only thing I knew about Laguna Beach's Pageant of the Masters show was the hilarious spoof the cult sitcom Arrested Development had done that made the 91-year-old tradition look absolutely ridiculous.

Arrested Development is by far my favorite and, imo, most accurate picture of Orange County in popular media – so I went into attending my very first Pageant this week with a bit of a bias. But now that I've seen the real deal, I can say it is indeed one of the most bizarre, but also, most incredible and intricate spectacles I've ever witnessed.

I'm only half an hour away from Laguna Beach, but for the last eight years I've lived in O.C., I just couldn't get excited about the idea of watching volunteer actors hold their breath, and their pose, for more than a minute while trying to recreate old famous paintings. That was, I thought, the essence of the Pageant of the Masters.

But this year, the theme intrigued me: fashion trends through the ages. (A friend later pointed out that the show is kinda always about fashion. It's not like they're going to choose boring, ugly paintings to recreate.)

I recruited a few friends, found some cheap tickets, and pitched a story to my editors.

Actors recreate Jean-Honoré Fragonard's painting The Swing (1767) at Pageant of the Masters in 2024.

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Courtesy of Pageant of the Masters

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Is that a real person?

It took about two seconds after the show started for me to realize it's much more than a tableau vivant, or living picture where actors pose to recreate a static scene. Pageant of the Masters is a full-on multimedia extravaganza, with projections, skits, and a live orchestra.

There is narration throughout, which gives history and context to the scenes, along with occasional corny quips.

When life-sized portraits appeared onstage of long-dead British monarchs, I couldn't tell whether I was looking at actual people or not. But then, they must be real people, I thought, because that's the whole point of this thing!

I spent the next 15 minutes or so obsessed with trying to catch one of the actors blinking, or moving a muscle. I never did.

I started to realize I was missing the whole show when producers 'pulled back the curtain,' so to speak, to demonstrate what they do to make the paintings on stage look so real.

Actors walk up into a three-dimensional background, which is surrounded by a frame that makes it look like the picture is floating above the stage floor. Curtains allow the stagehands to adjust the size of the frame to fit whatever painting they're recreating. The backdrops are intricate replicas of the original works, with missing spaces where real people and props stand in.

An actor in Pageant of the Masters poses as a jeweled brooch from 1900 by Gaston Lafitte.

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Courtesy of Pageant of the Masters

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And the actors — nearly 500 volunteers help put on the show — were amazingly still, even in the most uncomfortable looking positions. I later read in the program that they have props that help them hold a pose, like a seat belt for the pink-gowned woman soaring through the air in the recreation of Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Swing.
The humans posing as famous statues were similarly impeccable — if I didn't know, I would've thought they were just well-painted paper mache replicas, positioned there to enhance the overall theme of the show.

Pay up or bring your binoculars

It's possible those sitting closer to the stage can spot the difference between actor and prop or painted backdrop. I was in the cheap seats. And when I realized people around me had binoculars, I felt like a total noob.

So at intermission, I rented some. But honestly, I still couldn't identify the living, breathing humans on stage! After the show, I mused with a couple of women sitting near me that maybe you need to see the Pageant several times for your eyes to adjust to the surrealness of it all.

Applying makeup backstage at Pageant of the Masters in 2024.

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Courtesy of Ron Azevedo/Pageant of the Masters

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After looking at photos of the backstage prep and rehearsals, I realized that a major trick is in the makeup. The soft lines, unnatural colors and painted-on shadows turn the actors into doppelgängers of their brush-stroked models.

The weird fake hair — which, in closeups, looks like plastic Lego hair — is also key for certain recreations.

Actors recreate the illuminated manuscript entitled Royal Parisian Wedding, author unknown, at Pageant of the Masters in 2024.

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Courtesy of Pageant of the Masters

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It's all magic

I started to really enjoy the show, rather than just gawk, when I gave up on scrutinizing the details and declared the whole thing magic.

The show’s tribute to Edith Head, the eight-time Academy Award-winning costume designer, confirmed my conclusion. As we watched life-sized replicas of Alfred Hitchcock movie posters, and actors recreating a scene from The Birds, the narrator invoked this quote from Head:

(inline quote) "What a costume designer does is a cross between magic and camouflage. We create the illusion of changing the actors into what they are not."

If for nothing else, I'd go see the Pageant again because of the gorgeous setting. The amphitheater where it takes place, on the grounds of the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts, is like a smaller, more intimate Hollywood Bowl — without the light pollution.

When my eyes needed a break from staring at a scene, I looked up at the stars. Later, the waning moon peaked up above Laguna Canyon, just late enough not to upstage the show.