Putting the smartphone on stage
This year's Pageant of the Masters, “Gold Coast: Treasures of California," blended historical paintings with digital storytelling.
Today’s issue of PHONE TIME includes: a review of this year’s Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, California. Plus, a Southern California newspaper where you can submit pictures of your dog on a boat.
I just got back from California, where I went to the opening night of Pageant of the Masters 2025 show, “Gold Coast: Treasures of California.” Pageant of the Masters, in Laguna Beach, centers on tableaux vivants, or “living pictures.” Using makeup, props, costumes, lighting, posing, and meticulously positioned backdrops, works of art are recreated identically by real people onstage. Pageant is hosted by the Festival of Arts, a seasonal art festival held on the same grounds. First held in 1932, each year has a different theme, with one exception: the finale, “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci, remains constant.
This year’s theme was a letter to the California coast, featuring sculptures, paintings, landmarks, and other artifacts from museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum, and the Getty Museum.
I wasn’t originally planning to write about the show, but within the first few minutes, something happened that seemed especially relevant to the title of this newsletter: a phone screen was projected onstage. It showed a maps app while a woman, whose name I unfortunately cannot remember, narrated her preparations as she embarked on a road trip.
The phone becomes a storytelling lens in “Gold Coast.” Between the living pictures, our traveler narrator navigates to different museums across California, sends updates to friends and family, and takes plenty of selfies. A separate narrator explains the different artworks and histories we were seeing.
The phone projection reminded me of another production: “McNeal,” a one-act play by Ayad Akhtar, which starred Robert Downey Jr. in its limited-engagement Broadway run.
“In the Vivian Beaumont Theater, audience members are greeted by a mysterious, eerie sight: A giant iPhone lock screen, taking over the back of the stage, illuminated in a bright cobalt blue and impossible to ignore,” I wrote in my review of the play. The screen interface remains central throughout the duration of the story, showing the audience conversations that novelist Jacob McNeal has with an AI chatbot.
Several productions have experimented with the smartphone screen and broader projections to represent modern digital technologies. One example is “Dear Evan Hansen,” which uses projections of text messages and social media posts, with an Act One finale in which the “audience is basically brought inside the internet,” as John Bonazzo put it in Observer.
I think it can be a hard thing to pull off. As I wrote in my review, I found “McNeal” to be convoluted, and I don’t think the projected conversations between McNeal and the chatbot contributed clarity.
In contrast to “McNeal,” where the chatbot interface is central to the plot, in “Gold Coast,” the phone screen is more of an add-on rather than an integral part of the story. Although the map visuals were a cool way to visualize the journey and added a contemporary element to the production, they occasionally veered into kitschy and distracting.
It’s in its living pictures that, predictably, Pageant is at its best. Presented one by one, they’re an opportunity to do exactly what your phone discourages: slow down, appreciate the details, let your mind wander.
Related reading
“When your phone is the stage: new play takes place entirely via text message” — Joann Greco, Knight Foundation
“Review: In ‘Elements of Oz,’ Smartphones Enhance a Celebration of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ Film” — Charles Isherwood, The New York Times
“You download a special app that instructs you to put your phone in airplane mode until the show starts. The app then provides access to various elements that enhance the production, primarily nifty filters that, when you point the phone at the stage, add new layers of imagery to the action. When Dorothy’s house in Kansas flies skyward, for example, you can hold up your phone and see a real corker of a tornado and slashing rain that isn’t apparent to the naked eye,” Isherwood writes.
“How Kip Williams Remade ‘Dorian Gray’ for the TikTok Generation” — CT Jones, Rolling Stone
Print isn’t dead: The Log
Whenever I’m somewhere new, I make it a point to stop and check out any print newspapers I see. This weekend, I found a copy of The Log, which has published Southern California’s fishing and boating news since 1971. In addition to a print paper with 26 issues per year, The Log also publishes online.
On its website, readers can submit photos for “Dog Aboard” (a picture of their dog on a boat) and “Log Aboard” (a picture of them holding the print paper on a boat). It also covers local fish reports, obituaries from the boating community, and yacht club events.
In the most recent issue, Katherine M. Clements covers the app Anchor Alert by marine weather tech company PredictWind, speaking to founder Jon Bilger.
“Anchor Alert uses precise GPS tracking to continuously monitor a vessel’s position in relation to its anchor drop point. If the boat drifts beyond a user-defined radius, the app triggers audible and visual alerts. Swing and scope alerts help detect more subtle signs of anchor failure, giving boaters time to respond before drifting becomes dangerous,” Clements writes.