Laguna Beach

SoCal resort area blends culture with coastal beauty

Laguna Beach is not as high-profile as some other Southern California locations. There’s nothing “Hollywood” about it and it lacks the family theme-park attractions of San Diego. What it does have is an ambiance of the arts in full bloom, evident as soon as you turn west off Interstate 405 and begin noticing the array of artists’ studios and galleries, sophisticated restaurants and boutique shops lining Laguna Beach’s main street, which follows the coastline of the Pacific Ocean. Laguna Beach is a great place to relax and reconnect, as well as being ideally situated as a base for day trips to Los Angeles and San Diego.

An amazing view can be experienced in an ocean-facing room at Surf & Sand Resort.

Laguna Beach is famous for an annual artistic event called Pageant of the Masters. Since 1878, the town has been an artists’ colony. Tourists helped support the artists, and the community established the Laguna Art Association to promote their work. Things were rolling along pretty well until the Great Depression when, in a bid to keep paying the bills, the art community created a summer arts festival, the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts. The hit of the festival was the Living Pictures show created by artist and vaudevillian Lolita Perine. She dressed local residents in costume and seated them behind a makeshift frame to create living tableaus. This concept was later refined as the Pageant of the Masters and proved such a success that it’s going on to this day. This year’s Pageant takes its title and theme from Shakespeare's line, “All the World’s a Stage.” The show will offer 90 minutes of faithful art recreations of classical and contemporary works with real people posing to look exactly like their counterparts in the original paintings. The Pageant of the Masters will be performed in Laguna Beach in an outdoor amphitheater nightly from July 9 through August 30. Tickets for “All the World’s a Stage” are priced from $20 to $100. For further information, call 800-487-3378 or visit www.lagunafestivalofarts.com.

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