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SALT LAKE CITY -- The Hill Cumorah Pageant of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wrapped up its seven-night run in western New York over the weekend.
Pageant organizers told KSL Tuesday that preliminary figures indicate about 30,000 people attended, which appears typical for the annual event.
The church has held the pageant for the past 74 years in the rural town of Manchester, 25 miles southeast of Rochester.
The following is recent press coverage of this year's pageant:
- A grand display of Mormon faith, by Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times, features a couple from Arizona who, along with their three teenagers, decided to spend their summer volunteering at the pageant. "We wanted to do something more meaningful with our summer than eating in restaurants and seeing movies," Lee Preston said. Another volunteer, Kingsley Allan of Illinois, said the Hill Cumorah Pageant is "the antithesis of Disney World." The article quotes him saying, "Disney World is all gimme, gimme, gimme. This is about them giving back."
- Last week the New York Times noted the difference between the pageant and the hit Broadway musical "Book of Mormon." It calls the Hill Cumorah production "a Cecil B. DeMille-style presentation of the holy book rather than the cheerfully profane Broadway version."
- And in the Deseret News, Bryan Gentry writes that the trip to see the pageant was so worth it, even with "gasoline at $3.50 a gallon and finances tight."
(Photo: Wade Jewkes/Deseret News 2008)
