Many scenes are still played up on the hillside, on trails and clearings created in the s and '30s. The Ramona Bowl also hosts top name concerts, plays and even local high school graduations during the year. When Ramona falls in love with Alessandro, a young Indian sheepherder and the son of Pablo Assis, the chief of a tribe, Senora Moreno is outraged. She doesn't want her half-Indian "daughter" to marry an Indian. Ramona realizes that Senora Moreno has never loved her and she elopes with Alessandro.
They face constant hardship, chased from their land, their tools stolen and encroachment by the new immigrants constantly forcing them into further isolation. They have a child, Ramona, but unfortunately Allesandro's mental health deteriorates. The original story was written by Helen Hunt Jackson and published in Jackson was from the East, wealthy, and well educated.
She was a classmate of Emily Dickinson at Amherst and the two corresponded throughout their lives. In , Jackson attended a lecture by a Native American chief in Boston who described the exploitation of his tribe by greedy land speculators who forced the removal of his tribe, the Ponca, to Oklahoma, where they lived in poverty and near starvation. Jackson became an activist for Native rights at a time when most European Americans were still reeling from the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Undaunted, she enlisted allies among politicians and ministers and tirelessly advocated for the purchase of new and better lands for reservations. On a visit to California, she was told that only a few years earlier, an American wanted some land that was owned by a Soboba Indian in the San Jacinto Mountains above Hemet.
He was never arrested or tried. And he took the land. Hunt returned to New York and wrote Ramona in about three months. Though she died the next year, the book later went through printings and sold more than , copies, and The North American Review named it one of the most ethical books written in the 19th century.
It may have faded away as another literary curiosity, if not for an unusual theatrical impresario named Garnet Holme. Griffith, a specialist in outdoor pageants, outsized spectacles with multitudinous casts in natural settings. No doubt, Holme would be delighted to know his pageant is the longest-running outdoor play in the United States. The pageant used to be an indelible part of growing up in Southern California. For most fourth-graders, field trips were meant to augment their year-long study of California history.
It was a fairly common practice with 19th century traveling theater troupes to augment productions. The professionals would star in the lead roles while local townspeople would take the roles of spear carriers and ladies in waiting. However, Holme took it a gigantic step further. In the sleepy ranch and farm community of Hemet, he had a robust ethnic mix with which to fill out an Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American cast.
It also runs over one of the shortest seasons: six performances on three consecutive weekends from mid-April to early May. Plus, countless volunteers run the concessions and parking lot. The entire operation — parking lots, gift shop, costume and make up rooms, rehearsal hall, and corrals — consumes acres.
The average cast size is about people. The lady [Kathi Anderson] who plays Senora is my wife. The lady who had the role before her had it for 22 years. We have one family, the Arias Troubadours, who have been performing in the show since Cast members come from all over Southern California, though most are Hemet residents.
Though some of the lead actors from the early days were well known in their time, most names would not be recognized now. However, in , an aspiring actress and model from San Diego got her first acting gig playing Ramona.
Her name was Raquel Tejeda. She later changed it to Raquel Welch. And then, a few years later, a graduate of one of the Claremont colleges decided to audition for the role. There have been at least four films made from the novel, including a silent film by legendary director D.
Almost everyone works for free. Among the few people to be paid are the actors playing Ramona and Alessandro and the artistic director. Some families have volunteered for generations and many people have been associated with the show for three decades or more. Kayla Contreras , 22, who grew up in Hemet and is a senior at Cal State Fullerton, will portray Ramona for the third year in a row.
Joseph Valdez will be Alessandro, the male lead, for the fourth time. Children learn about missions and their importance in early California. Cast members visit schools in fall and spring. Thousands of Riverside and San Bernardino county fourth-graders travel to Hemet each April for a free performance, a tradition that dates to the mids.
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