PUPPETS TO PUT NEW LIFE IN PAGEANT : ‘Sicilian Opera’ Is a Radical Change for Laguna Beach Show : Half the Work of Pageant Is Getting on the Scene

For 50 years, the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters has presented an eye-catching stage novelty: people posing as motionless figures in billboard-sized paintings, sculptures, ceramics and even coins.

Touted as the only show of its kind in the United States, the pageant has attracted thousands each summer with a spectacle that has as much to do with human endurance as it does with re-creating famous art.

But this year’s $730,000 two-hour pageant, which runs July 10 to Aug. 30 at the Irvine Bowl, will offer one sequence that is a radical departure from such traditional tableau re-creations as Winslow Homer’s “Snap the Whip” and the usual finale, Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”

In “Orlando Furioso,” the pageant is using moving human figures for the first time in the sequence featuring life-sized puppets as medieval knights, damsels and demons.

Pageant officials admit that the 12-minute “Sicilian Puppet Opera” sequence, featuring 19 marionette figures, is an attempt to put more oomph into a show that has changed little since it began in 1933.

“Not everyone may like this change, and some may feel we’re tampering with the show,” said John Rayment, president of the board that operates both the pageant and the Festival of Arts.

“We don’t feel that way. We believe the essence of our show is still being preserved.”

Besides, Rayment added, even for the Pageant of the Masters there is the need to keep a competitive edge. The Pageant of the Masters, expected to sell out the 2,662-seat Irvine Bowl for the 21st consecutive summer, remains Laguna Beach’s biggest show attraction.

However, as Rayment and other officials tell it, there are signs of box office slippage. At one time the pageant was sold out months before its summer run began. Since 1984, sellouts do not occur until well into the run--a pattern expected again this summer.

While hardly a case for panic, Rayment said the slower ticket sales do raise concerns: “Three years ago, it was the Olympics that hit us. Now, we believe, it’s the increasing competition from not only amusement parks but also new facilities like the (Orange County) Performing Arts Center.”

To keep the crowds coming, Rayment said the pageant board is still exploring the possibility of large-scale improvements, including a much-debated proposal to build a pageant amphitheater on a larger new site.

Such proposals, however, have been shelved by the pageant board, which recently signed an agreement to stay at least another 15 years at the city-owned, six-acre Irvine Bowl complex.

For now, Rayment said the focus is on small-scaled renovations of the 33-year-old Irvine Bowl and current festival grounds ($200,000 was spent this year to upgrade staging facilities and various grounds areas).

And the other push is to brush up the pageant’s 50-year-old format.

Since 1979, when he took over as pageant director, Glen Eytchison said he has tried just such program revamping.

While the life-sized reproductions of the Gainsboroughs, Millets, Sargents and Rockwells have continued, along with the Roman and Egyptian friezes, Oriental prints and Dresden porcelain, Eytchison has also expanded the use of less lofty media, such as circus posters and orange-crate labels.

“We need to add a certain vibrance, a real change of pace. We need works that are striking contrasts in theme and style, maybe even a little offbeat,” Eytchison said.

In the same vein, Eytchison has made greater use of original music, quickened the scene-changing pace and added small touches of movement, such as a rocking boat in one otherwise motionless tableau.

The idea of the puppet figures came in 1985 during one of Eytchison’s searches for production ideas in art books and catalogues. This search brought him to a book on the Sicilian Puppet Opera, whose centuries-old folk art became immensely popular in America’s Italian immigrant communities.

The only trouble was that the book was written in Sicilian. With the help of UC Irvine scholars and a community organization, Patrons for Italian Culture, Eytchison got key passages translated. He also found data on puppet theater from the International Puppetry Museum in Whittier.

He found that one of the most enduring puppet sagas was taken from the epic work “Orlando Furioso” by the Italian Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto. The work, set at the time of Charlemagne’s battles with the Saracens, follows the adventures in love and war of the knight Orlando (Roland).

In the actual Sicilian Puppet Opera versions, five-foot-tall wood-and-metal puppets, each weighing more than 100 pounds, were manipulated by rods and strings, Eytchison said.

The Pageant of the Masters version simulates the string and rod effects, as well as the halting, stiff marionette-like movements for sword fighting and other scenes.

The costumes, including garments of painted muslin and moire, are resplendent in bright reds, greens and golds. The helmets and armor are made of foam painted in glittering silver. The most striking marionette is the devil--who is streaked with yellow and other hues and fitted with horns and batlike wings.

The 38 puppet performers (for a rotating nightly cast of 19) were recruited from the volunteer auditions held three months ago. They are performing in one of the pageant’s biggest numbers to date: eight scenes spread over four stages, including two platforms installed on the hillsides.

Indeed, to the “Orlando Furioso” cast, the experience is very special.

“I’ve been in the past two pageants in the regular tableaux, but this one is even more exciting, more special,” said Tom Thiel, 27, of Costa Mesa. Last year, he was a movie patron in the Reginald Marsh painting, “Twenty-Cent Movie”; in 1985, a Roman soldier in an ancient bas relief.

Thiel and the other “puppets” find the Orlando saga an exceptionally appealing one for the 1980s--a cross between “Camelot” and “Star Wars.”

“It’s got everything in it--good and evil, chivalry, all kinds of magic,” said another pageant veteran, Jill Anderson, 16, of Mission Viejo, who plays the winged devil.

“People should really go for it. It’s a real neat story.”