A Trick But Not a Treat

Laterna Magika is a marriage of drama, music and movies, and it develops both the hoopla and the problems of the menage 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 2 1/2hour 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).

As a tour de technique, the show is fascinating. Sometimes an actor shows up on the stage, sometimes on one of the screens. Once, when the hero tries to find him, the villain darts elusively from one screen to another. Sometimes the live actors slip behind the main screen, which is transparent, and appear to play parts in the picture. The actors in the picture meanwhile play parts on the stage. When the live actors sing at them, they sing back. Sometimes the same figure sings from three screens at once. Sometimes each screen is a different color. Sometimes all are black and white. Sometimes the negatives are reversed. Sometimes the images on the screen and the scenes onstage are split and scattered in a maze of mirrors till illusion and reality dissolve in shimmering similitude.

All 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 is continually aware that he is watching a trick, an immensely intricate trick that doesn't quite come off. Even if it did come off, Laterna Magika would still be a trick and not a treat. It is illegitimate theater.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.