New ‘Home’ for Pageant Is Opposed in San Clemente

The colorful fund-raising brochure depicts “the Dream.”

Nestled in the San Clemente hills near a string of subdivision homes, “the Dream” would be a six-tiered, 3,000-seat, $5-million amphitheater plus a 300-seat music hall, half a dozen shops and a large dining hall.

Directors of the La Cristianita Pageant, a historical pageant/passion play that runs for about four weeks each summer, have wanted a permanent, year-round facility for 10 years, pageant chairwoman Bertha Henry Taylor said Wednesday. Until now, pageant audiences--usually a total of 3,000 people each summer--have sat outdoors in a canyon on bleachers.

But so far, San Clemente residents are far from entranced with the pageant directors’ idea.

If they wanted a “Hollywood Bowl-type” project in their backyard, they would have moved to Hollywood, said several residents who learned about the project either by word of mouth or by reading some 4,000 fund-raising flyers mailed out by pageant officials.

Complaints From Residents

In letters to the local newspaper and at a meeting with pageant officials, residents have complained about the amphitheatre’s potential for creating noise and traffic congestion and for disrupting their rustic life style.

“We don’t want to see a scaled-down version. We don’t want to see it at all,” said Peter Hampson, representing several thousand homeowners from the Forster Ranch development. Hampson said the project “resembles something I’d throw the Christians to the lions in.”

Also concerned are San Clemente city officials, who scheduled an unusual community hearing on the project Wednesday night.

Although pageant officials have not yet sought any city permits--or raised the money they need to build--city staff members in a memorandum to the council attempted to analyze the project through their scrutiny of the pageant directors’ fund-raising brochure.

City Manager James B. Hendrickson noted that the 60-acre site is zoned for open space. If the project ever were to be approved, it would need a conditional-use permit and extensive reviews, especially concerning its impact on noise, traffic and parking, he said.

The City Council asked that pageant directors return with more detailed plans on April 1. “It would be nice to get a plan down here to allay a lot of fears,” Councilman Brian J. Rice said. The pageant’s architect, Frank Montesinos, said he thought residents were overly concerned about the project, but “now I’m sure we have to scale it down. But I don’t think we’re going to give up the idea.”

Meanwhile, pageant chairwoman Taylor said she doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. “They have jumped to a lot of conclusions,” she said of residents opposing the project. “They have misunderstood what we want to put out there. They think it’s going to create a bad element . . . that it’s going to (bring) rowdyism. I think they’re thinking of rock concerts. And we’re not.”

Rather, Taylor said, the nonprofit amphitheater complex would be used for ballets, Easter Sunrise services, high school commencements, community events and the like.

Seek $5 Million

Besides, she noted, fund raising for the project only began in January, and “we’re nowhere ready to start.” So far, she said, pageant directors have only raised $20,000 of the $5 million they believe they need to build the amphitheater.

The pageant directors’ brochure encourages donors to be “part of one of the most ambitious projects in South Orange County. . . . Countless thousands will enjoy the bowl in the years to come, but only a proud and precious few will look at the bowl and say: ‘I was there when it all began, when the land was dust and the dream was new. I helped to make it happen. . . .’ ”

The pageant has been a San Clemente tradition since 1954, when local writer Jenniebelle Bartlett wrote a play, “The Cross and the Arrow,” depicting the first Christian baptism of an Indian baby in California. For several years beginning in the 1960s, the play was not produced, said Taylor, who helped to get the production going again in 1976, just in time for the nation’s bicentennial celebration.

Held outdoors in a natural canyon off Camino de los Mares, the elaborate pageant uses live animals and a cast of more than 100. Pageant directors have been seriously considering a permanent site for the production since January, 1985, when the developer of the 1,919-acre Forster Ranch gave them 60 acres of land. Forster Ranch residents have raised some of the strongest objections to the amphitheater.