Last year, before I attended the Utah Pageant of the Arts for the very first time, I tried to explain to my somewhat reluctant offspring just what it was we were going to see. After being taken, collectively and individually down through the years to an assortment of performing-arts experiences - some terrific, some really dreadful - my daughters no longer readily accept the old ploy of "We're going to the theater, concert, ice show, etc. Won't that be fun?!!"
Our conversation went something like this:
DAD: We're going to the Utah Pageant of the Arts tomorrow night. It'll be a neat experience. You'll love it.
CHILD: A pageant? You mean like Miss Universe? Or like that big "Mormon Miracle" one every summer down in Manti?
DAD: Well, maybe a little of both. There are probably going to be some beautiful women in the show, and it also has a big, BIG cast.
CHILD: Oh, so it's a play.
DAD: Not really. But it does take place on the stage of the Capitol Theatre.
CHILD: What do you mean "not really" a play?
DAD: Well, with a combination of live performers, scenery and lighting, this pageant recreates - on stage - nearly two dozen artworks, everything from classic paintings and sculpture to delicate Hummel figurines and Dresden china.
CHILD: So you want us to sit in this theater while a bunch of people just stand or sit still posing on stage? Don't they dance?
DAD: No.
CHILD: Or sing?
DAD: No.
CHILD: They don't even talk to each other?
DAD: Nope.
CHILD: That sounds borrring! Can't we see an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie instead?
DAD: Believe me, it's not boring.
There's music and narration and sometimes they even put one of the scenes together or take it apart right there, so you can see how the production works.
Well, the upshot was, I did manage to convince my kids that perhaps one evening at the Capitol Theatre watching the Utah Pageant of the Arts would be OK.
So we went to the pageant - and before the show was over, it was apparent that my family was caught up in the excitement of seeing some of the world's most celebrated works of art brought to life on stage.
Instead of being bored, they were alternately awed, fascinated, mesmerized and moved. In fact, 90 minutes or so later, when the curtain came down, they had that familiar "Is that all there is?" look on their faces.
Founder/director of the Utah Pageant of the Arts, David Brockbank, calls the pageant "technical theater."
For the past 19 years, my colleagues and I at the Deseret News have never been exactly sure how to categorize it. It's a hybrid combination of both visual arts and theater.
If you can't take the time (or money) to visit the great museums and art collections in the world, then Brockbank and his staff will bring parts of the Louvre or the Huntington Library galleries to you.
For its 20th anniversary season, June 5-27, the Utah Pageant of the Arts will mount 23 separate scenes, opening with a replication of Paul Manship's Prometheus and closing with Michelangelo Buonarroti's La Pieta.
Commenting on the last piece, Brockbank tells of a building custodian in the old American Fork High School, where the pageant was staged until moving to Salt Lake City last year. The janitor was moved to tears by the emotional impact of La Pieta. He had seen the sculpture before, but seeing it recreated by live people was a new experience.
There are 23 scenes in the 90-minute program, with 37 individual artworks presented. Some scenes feature collections of four or five Hummel or Lladro figurines.
There'll also be a mix of both new and "back by popular demand" recreations.
Two of the world's most-beloved paintings, both of which hang in the Henry E. Huntington Library gallery in San Marino, Calif., have long been audience favorites. Sir Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy and Sir Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie will be recreated again this year at the pageant.
Both were among the paintings featured in the very first pageant 20 years ago, when the show ran for only four nights. (And Brockbank notes that The Blue Boy and Pinkie were also the first works in the long-running Laguna Beach Pageant of the Arts in California, which began as that famous artists' colony's antidote to the Great Depression - and which became the inspiration for Brockbank to mount a similar production in Utah 20 years ago.)
Many people mistakenly think that the subjects for The Blue Boy and Pinkie - because the paintings are often paired together - were brother and sister, but they're not. The painters and most likely the models, too, were about a generation apart. The model for Pinkie was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's aunt, who died shortly after the painting was finished. The model for The Blue Boy was a lad off the streets of London. The Royal Academy of Arts had fostered the theory that blue could never be used as a predominant color in a painting, so Gainsborough, an artistic rebel, created The Blue Boy - which was an immediate success.
One new work, originally planned for the 1991 show but delayed until this year due to its complexity, is The Mermaid Pendant, the replication of a piece of Victorian jewelry by an unknown artist.
"Of all the blockbuster pieces in our past 19 years," said Brockbank,"this will be the most dazzling, sparkling piece we've ever done."
It will be presented as a necklace, with the giant pendant - featuring two young women weighing about 100 pounds each - dangling above the stage floor. The actual pendant is about three inches from top to bottom, but the replication - constructed from a steel and wood frame - is 12 feet high. The pearls are carved from foam, then smoothed and coated with several layers of enamel for the right eggshell finish. The entire piece weighs about 275 pounds. It's counterweighted, so it can be dropped into place from the Capitol Theatre's fly system.
"The stage machinery in the Capitol Theatre is just invaluable for a show as technical as this," Brockbank said. "This show is continually moving. There's no waiting for a scene to end. It's a stage technician's delight because they are the real movers and power behind the show."
The performers - who are auditioned and chosen solely on the basis of size, shape and appearance - also enjoy the experience because they don't have to spend weeks and weeks in rehearsal. There is no dialogue and no "acting." They just have to move fast (there's less than a minute to get into place between scenes), and once the lights come up, they have to hold perfectly still for about a minute and a half. The time on stage is dictated by the length of Aaron C. Card's narration and the background music.
Brockbank said there will be more "how we do it" demonstrations this year.
"Audiences look at Pinkie and are convinced the girl is just posing with her head through a hole in a large painting, but when she steps off her platform, they can see she's wearing an actual full-length costume," said Brockbank.
While audiences are awed by the recreations on stage, much of the real activity is backstage and behind the scenes. Each year, the pageant spends about $4,500 just for makeup. Some of the full-body pieces require almost a gallon of white makeup - which runs $35 to $40 a gallon.
Only on rare occasions do performers appear in more than one scene. This year, for instance, one man will appear in replications of two marble sculptures - as Acteon in Paul Manship's Acteon and Diana, and, in the finale, as Christ in La Pieta.
Brockbank says he strives for a two-dimensional look in the pageant, rather than the three-dimensional appearance of a diorama. All of the shadows and highlights in the original paintings are recreated with as much care and painstaking detail as possible - but they're painted on or done with cosmetics, not with the lighting.
Brockbank said the past two decades have been interesting.
One year, for Maxfield Parrish's The Garden of Allah (also being recreated this year), one girl whose leg had been amputated due to cancer was able to portray one of the characters in the painting - a young woman who was seated in such a way that audiences were unaware of her handicap.
Another time, a mentally retarded boy was part of the Yankee Doodle scene in The Spirit of '76.
Because there is no dialogue and no actual acting, the performers don't rehearse the entire show until just two nights before it opens. There are about 140 cast members for the 20-performance run. Half of them appear in the first 10 performances, and the other half are in the last 10 shows.