Laterna Magika

Before the audience are three gorgeous girls. They are talking among themselves. They all look exactly alike. They are indeed the same chick--one in the flesh and two on movie screens.

Actually, they are the same Czech, appearing in Czechoslovakia's unique Laterna Magika at a Munich theater. Using ten screens of assorted sizes, five projectors, 21 technicians, 17 performers and two conveyor belts, Laterna Magika achieves a series of kinetic marvels that leaves the Germans jawohling in the aisles. Actors on the boards engage in dance and dialogue with actors on the screens, mingling reality and illusion, adding to the stage the weightless ease of movies and to the movies the presence of theater.

A male dancer reaches into a movie screen for his ballerina and performs a perfect pas de deux with her projected image. A pianist plays onstage accompanied by seven movie versions of himself, playing different instruments. A roller skater, chasing four girls who have boarded a bus, rolls downhill on the narrow streets of the oldest quarter of Prague, dodging pedestrians, cars, cops, beer carts, fire engines, lampposts. This roller skater is onstage as well as on various screens, weaving and skirring from one medium to the other. Some spectators found this bizarre slalom more breathtaking than the roller-coaster ride in the original Cinerama.

More Art than Farce. An old silent movie flashes onto a screen. An unfaithful wife shoves her lover into a large armoire when her husband unexpectedly returns from a business trip. A second screen lights up. On it, Othello is about to strangle Desdemona, her cleavage akimbo. Screen 1: the wife shoves the armoire out of sight to hide it, but ends by shoving it right into Screen 2.

The jealous Moor opens the armoire. He discovers the enclosed lover, who emerges and shoves Othello, first on film, then live, across the gap and onto the other screen. The husband returning from the business trip now finds Othello in his wife's armoire. Farce to be sure, but so neatly coordinated that its humor is as artful as it is foolish.

Only in America. In 1918, the 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 at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall.

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