Pageant
The Pageant is held eight weeks each summer and consists of 90 minutes of "living pictures" accompanied by a professional narrator, an orchestra, and period songs by professional vocalists. It hosts more than a quarter million people each year.
Like all nonprofit volunteer projects in general, the Pageant is put on by a small paid staff and several hundred volunteers. Production begins in January with auditions and casting of volunteers from all over Southern California; it takes over 60,000 volunteer hours to put on the two-month Pageant in July and August. Today, the costumes and makeup involved are very elaborate and often require large commitments of volunteer time (in terms of arriving early and staying late), so to reduce the impact on individual volunteers, the Pageant selects two full casts known as Blue and Green, which then alternate back and forth.
Read more about this topic: Pageant Of The Masters
Famous quotes containing the word pageant:
“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)
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself—
Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“What helps it now, that Byron bore,
With haughty scorn which mock’d the smart,
Through Europe to the Aetolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands counted every groan,
And Europe made his woe her own?”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)