Living: In Laguna Beach, a Living Louvre

Look quick! That Botticelli Venus is Aunt Marge!

A celebrated artists' colony before soaring real estate prices displaced the easel set, Southern California's Laguna Beach is better known these days for a kind of living Louvre. Each July and August, as the crowning glory of its 50-year-old Festival of the Arts, the town mounts a Pageant of the Masters: a display of tableaux vivants reproducing famous artworks with human figures in a 12-ft. by 30-ft. picture frame onstage. The show runs slightly more than two hours at an outdoor theater called the Irvine Bowl.

For some of the 17,000 Lagunatics, as the locals call themselves with a fair degree of accuracy, this trompe l'oeil in reverse is a year-round obsession. With the help of 20 full-time backstage professionals, 500 volunteers put on the nightly exhibitions, which lure 300,000 viewers and will gross $1.8 million this year. The festival distributes $100,000 in art scholarships to Laguna High School graduates.

The locals act as if their tableaux came down from Mount Parnassus. Some 4,500 dues-paying ($5 a year) members of the festival organization have the right to buy 16 tickets at up to $20 each. "The pageant is a chance for us to be part of something creative," explains Clem Troy Sr., a Laguna-based engineer, who, with his wife and three children, has taken part in four of them. "I'm no artist myself, but the pageant is part of this country's culture."

The artistic director, Glen Eytchison, 27, is an intense veteran of Southern California repertory theater, whose appointment four years ago stirred premonitions that he would emphasize avant-garde art, even (Pollock forbid!) abstract expressionists. Not to worry. "You have to understand the people of Laguna," Eytchison allows. "I am concerned with retaining their tradition. Of course, the show has to be bigger and better every year, but you can only stretch so far." This year's edition stretches to 24 tableaux, each of which is shown for about 90 seconds. They range from classics like Degas' Dancers Practicing at the Bar and Seurat's Bathing to canvases by American painters Winslow Homer (Crab Fishing off Yarmouth) and John Sloan (Picnic Grounds). There are also reproductions of a medieval tapestry, History of Venus, and several sculptures, notably St. George and the Dragon by Fritz Preiss and Fulda's 11th century antependium for Basel Cathedral. An audience favorite is Norman Rockwell, who has four Saturday Evening Post covers this year. As always, the pageant winds up with Da Vinci's Last Supper.

To remind glassy-eyed viewers that the scenes are not simply enlarged reproductions of originals, Director Eytchison shows the cast actually taking their places in the Homer painting while screens of a roiling sea and a tempestuous sky are lowered into place. It is the hit of the show. A mildly didactic narration is supplied by eight-year Veteran Thurl Ravenscroft, who provides off-pageant the voice for television's Tony the Tiger ("Grreeaatt!"). There is a suitably reverent score by Richard Henn, a prolific composer who has scored five feature films.