Mormon Miracle Pageant Celebrates Silver Anniversary

Twenty-five years ago, the Mormon Miracle Pageant had its debut performance at the Sanpete County Fairgrounds in central Utah. Only a few local Church members attended. This year, some 150,000 visitors will attend the eight performances presented on the hill below the Manti Temple.

The pageant had its beginnings in the 1940s in a lecture Grace Johnson, an Ephraim, Utah, native, presented to Kiwanis and rotary clubs throughout the eastern United States. She titled her dramatic presentation “The Mormon Miracle,” focusing on the Restoration and the LDS exodus from Nauvoo to Utah. When the tour was over, she shelved the lecture, thinking that was the last time she would deliver it.

But in 1947 she was asked to present it at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City to help celebrate the centennial of the arrival in Utah of the Mormon pioneers. Subsequent presentations included trips to several western states.

In 1950, Deseret Book Company published the dramatic presentation in book form, and it was performed by both large and small groups over the next decade and a half. In 1964, Brigham Young University presented it with a speaking cast of narrators accompanied by the university’s symphony orchestra and a 75-voice choir.

Three years later, in 1967, Sister Johnson’s stake presidency asked her to turn “The Mormon Miracle” into a stage production for their July 24 celebration. The Manti pageant was performed that first time at the county fairgrounds. It has been performed every year since then on the Manti Temple grounds.

Many consider the first performance of the Mormon Miracle Pageant a miracle itself. The evening of the performance, clouds rolled across the valley, thunder rumbled, lightning flashed, and rain turned the fairgrounds into a stage of mud. However, when the invocation was offered, the rain stopped until the performance was over.

Today, rain or shine, Manti and its surrounding communities are filled to capacity during the eight days the pageant is presented. Don Tibbs, chairman of the pageant’s anniversary committee, remembers the night when a General Authority was staying in his guest room, an out-of-town family was sleeping on his basement floor, a Boy Scout troop was camped on his front lawn, and thirty visitors from Guatemala were sleeping in tents in his backyard.

“You had to make an appointment to wash your face,” he recalls, smiling.

Pageant attendance has grown steadily through the years. Two thousand people attended the pageant’s first performance in 1967. By 1970, forty thousand people were attending its eight performances.

In 1970, a professional sound track featuring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Mormon Youth Symphony and Chorus was incorporated to that the steadily increasing audience could hear every word. Macksene Smith Rux, pageant director for many years, modified and expanded the script.

This year will mark the last presentation of the production familiar to the hundreds of thousands who have attended it since 1970. The Manti Utah Stake, sponsor of the pageant, has announced that a new script will be written for future performances.

Performances this year will be held on the evenings of July 11–13 and 16–20, beginning at dusk.

In a scene from the pageant, a family pushes their handcart westward.