From Canyon to Cove:

It’s become my mantra. Every year the Pageant of the Masters is “the best one yet.” And yet this antique but ageless art of tableaux vivant tableaux vivant continues to thrill audiences with its ability to put the viewer in the middle of art masterpieces from the ages. For those who love art, and those who are learning to love art, it’s unforgettable.

This year’s show, “The Muse,” is especially affecting. Pageant director Diane Challis Davy has pulled together major muses from the history of art — all women — and interwoven the stories of female artists who not only inspired art but created it. The result is a masterwork of emotion that grabs and doesn’t let go until the traditional ending, “The Last Supper.”

But before we get there, Davy gives us some extra thrills and spills, which I won’t reveal because it would spoil the fun. Suffice to say, this show moves from the classical Greek “Nine Muses” to the “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.” What a blast!

This year’s Pageant seems to have more than the usual number of nudes, possibly because of the inclusion of so many sculptural works, including works by the tragic sculptor Camille Claudel, a model, muse and mistress to Rodin. The audience around us gasped as one when narrator Skip Conover told the story of Claudel’s life after spending years toiling in the background as Rodin’s model and mistress: 30 years in an insane asylum, where she died. Claudel’s works are the penultimate of the show, followed only by “The Last Supper,” and were exquisite.

But the show-stopper for many was the huge Lalic dragonfly brooch, a bare-breasted, blue-painted woman atop an enormous gold wing platform, which drew whistles from some in the crowd.

I confess to having an unreasonable partiality for Maxfield Parrish prints, so I was intrigued to learn of his interesting relationship to his muse, Sue Lewin, who served as a model for dozens of his characters, male and female. Lewin, originally hired as a nanny for the married Parrish, worked as his studio assistant, model, stylist and muse for decades, and, it was said, his mistress. This story is told not only through narration and the depiction of some of Parrish’s most ethereal and transporting works, but also given the “voice” of Parrish himself by Charles Shaughnessy.

Another fascinating story brought to life by scriptwriter Dan Duling is that of Frieda Kahlo. Married to the famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo turned her struggles with the aftermath of a nearly fatal accident in her teens — having some 30 surgeries and living encased in a back brace — into surrealistic artworks that have all but eclipsed her husband’s art in popularity. In the Pageant, Kahlo is brought to life by the voice of Claudia Vázquez.

The story of painter Rosa Bonheur, for whom a street is named after in Laguna Beach, is another singular tale of a woman pursuing her art. Bonheur was famous for obtaining official permission of the French government to wear men’s clothing in order to visit slaughterhouses to study animal anatomy and in the process became a friend of Buffalo Bill, who apparently had a thing for women in trousers.