Word: laterna
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...stage The Flying Dutchman. Everding, 40, is the di rector of Munich's Kammerspiele, one of Europe's most highly regarded repertory theaters. Czechoslovak Svoboda, 49, is famed both for his mastery of lighting techniques (he was one of the leading figures of Prague's celebrated Laterna Magika) and for startling stage designs (TIME, July...
Perhaps best of all, aside from the Games, are the "cultural Olympics." Now on view in the city are special art exhibits, an international film festival, a New Orleans jazz band, Belgium's Ballet of the 20th Century, the Laterna Magika show from Czechoslovakia, and Mexico's own famed Folklórico dance troupe. It all ends up, as the Mexicans predicted, as a big fiesta for the whole world...
...Laterna Magika is a marriage of drama, music and movies, and it develops both the hoopla and the problems of the ménage a trois. Invented by two clever Czechs named Alfred and Emil Radok, Laterna Magika is presented on a split-level stage surrounded and intersected by movie screens: wide screens, narrow screens, square screens, round screens-one, two, five, ten, thirteen screens illuminated by three projectors projecting several pictures at the same time and the whole gazingstock accompanied by a skull-splitting roar of stereophonic sound...
Last week after a six-year run in Prague and several tours of Europe, Laterna Magika arrived for a six-week stand in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. On opening night a full and fashionable house sat still for a 2½hour show that started with a swift skid through schmaltz (a 90-minute medley of scenes from Jacques Offenbach's romantic opera, Tales of Hoffmann) and finished with a swift skip through the silly side of the medium (a hilarious short subject in which the actors in one movie wander accidentally into another...
...this is fun, and it snowed some European critics. But to American audiences, sated with TV spectaculars and such, Laterna is scarcely magika. Its taste is dated and decadent. The spectator sees with sad surprise that Hoffmann's masks and mirrors, carriages and candelabra are no longer considered arty by the Party. What's more, the show attempts too many things at once and too few of them really fit together. The actors on the screen, for instance, continually steal scenes from the actors on the stage-they are bigger, brighter, louder. As a result, the spectator...