Word: laterna
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Dates: during 1964-1964
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...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...
...great Sergei Eisenstein produced a show in Russia that combined stage and cinema, and in the '30s a theater project of the WPA did a similar experiment on Broadway. Then the hybrid form remained dormant until two brothers named Emil and Alfred Radok developed it into Laterna Magika, starting in 1948. They mainly saw it, says Emil, "as a means to add new interpretations and new dimensions to already existing works, and as a real possibility for creating entirely new works...
Their version of Tales of Hoffmann, with principals live and all secondary characters on film, has long been the major tourist attraction of Prague. Laterna's Munich engagement is one of its few appearances outside the Iron Curtain since the Brussels World's Fair, and Laterna Magika techniques, curiously enough, have been used in quite minor ways in both the Du Pont and Texas shows at the present New York World's Fair. This summer the Laterna Magika company itself will cross the Atlantic for the first time. A four-month tour of the U.S. will begin...