The Mormon Miracle Pageant is a Latter-day Saint Pageant (an annual outdoor theatrical performance) held in Manti, Utah. It is produced by an amateur cast of over five hundred members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes called the LDS Church). The nightly program takes place on the south lawn of temple hill at the Manti Temple. The two-week pageant typically draws an average of 15,000 people per night over an eight-night performance.
The performance begins shortly after sunset, during the early summer (usually late June). People often start arriving several hours before the performance. In addition to restaurants in the town, there are special food stands for the event. Light security is provided at the performance site and the surrounding streets to ensure general order and to direct traffic, though it has not typically been known to be needed (never any significant disorder). The pageant is, for Mormon believers, a faith-promoting family event.
Famous quotes containing the words mormon, miracle and/or pageant:
“If you excommunicate one of us there will be 10 more to step up and take her place. Excommunicate those 10 and there will be 100 to take their places.”
—Lynn Knavel Whitesides, U.S. Mormon feminist. As quoted in the New York Times, p. 7 (October 2, 1993)
“My faith shall wax, when thou art in thy waning.
The world shall find this miracle in me,
That fire can burn when all the matter’s spent:
Then what my faith hath been thyself shalt see,
And that thou wast unkind thou may’st repent.—
Thou may’st repent that thou hast scorn’d my tears,
When Winter snows upon thy sable hairs.”
—Samuel Daniel (1562–1619)
“The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)