Secrets of the Pantomime.

New Zealand Graphic, 6 April 1907, Page 20

Secrets of the Pantomime.

HOW STAGE EFFECTS ARE PRODUCED. In a popular pantomime now running there is a military scene, in which a battery of artillery is heard galloping over a plain, says a writer in “Answers.” Of course, - battery of artillery cannot possibly gallop behind the scenes in order to produce the effects, so the sounds of rattling guns are artificially made in this way. A quantity of sand, with some loose bricks and gravel, is placed in a trough; an empty soap-box is tilled with scraps of old iron. This box is placed on a small truck, similar to a railway porter’s truck on which he wheels passengers’ luggage. When the battery of artillery is supposed to come galloping over the plain, which the audience cannot see, a stage hand runs the truck (rearing the box of old iron backwards and forwards at a rapid rate over the trough. The bricks in the trough, of course, make the truck bump, which causes the old iron in the soap-box to rattle in just the same way as heavy guns rattle in their limbers. In another pantomime a building is blown up. This building is made of papier-mache, and when a few ropes are pulled behind the stage it comes crashing down at the very moment an explosion takes place, and volumes of smoke rise in a lurid glare. The explosion is due to a quantity of gunpowder, lycopodium, and sawdust ignited in an iron pot secreted in the building. The lurid glare is produced by the lycopodium and sawdust.

The thuds of falling beams and crashing timbers that accompany the demolition of this building are realistic enough. Dropped cannon balls furnish the thuds, while the tearing, crackling noise, you have heard when a portion of the building is being rent is produced by a “ crasher,” a grooved cylinder working against slats of wood set in a frame. As the cylinder revolves its rid<»es cateh the ends of the slats of wood, bend them, and let them go with a snap, causing a most realistic tearing sound. All pantomime-goers are probably familiar with the “ star-trap ” and “vampire ” acts. These features are not so common as they used to be, still they have not died out. A “vampire” is a trap-door in the floor of the stage, and the uantomimisl, dressed, perhaps, as a demon, ill bound across the stage and suddenly disappear through the folding doors. Below the “ vampire ”is a canvas shoot running down to the depths of the theatre. At the bottom of the shoot are soft pillows, in ease the two attendants waiting at the sides of the shoot do not catch the performer in their arms as be descends. So soon as he is on his feet, the attendants push him on to a small wooden platform, which has four uprights, one at each corner, reaching to the stage. He stands bolt upright, with his arms pressed to his sides. The attendants withdraw a bolt, and the pantomimist shoots upwards like a flash of lightning, disappears !’ rough a portion of the stage cut in star sections, and bounds, in view of the audience, some six feet above the stage. As he descends be opens his legs in order to dear the “ star,” which shuts up automatically as he leaches the stage.

Visitors to the pantomimes have no doubt seen fairies slowly rise in a cloud of light from the back of the stage until they reach the flies. It may not be generally known that the girls are strapped upon a large movable scene, for the straps are so ingeniously covered with drapery that from the front of the stage the fairies appear to have no support whatever. As a rule, these scenes are very cumbersome, ami often take thirty or forty scene-shifters to work them. Transformation scenes are always troublesome to a stage-manager. A performer may jump the wrong way, as did a young lady in the provinces last Christmas. A scene had suddenly to be thrown into another, and for this purpose what is known as a “ sink and rise” was employed. One of the actresses, intending to leave the stage, turned in the wrong direction, and stepped over the edge of the boarding where a portion of the scenery had just disappeared. She

fell a distance of twenty feet, and wafi seriously injured. Live animals very rarely take part in pantomimes, and actors and actresses ■prefer to perform without the assistance of their four-footed friends, beeause the latter claim more attention from the audience than their histrionic merits deserve. Every pantomime usually has some animal in the cast, but this is generally a man or a couple of boys in a skin. In the few eases where real animals are employed their feet are covered with rubber to keep them from pounding the boards, and they arc tied in a way to make them incapable of suddenly walking through the footlights and tumbling among the members of the orchestra.

Talking of animals, it is interesting fo know that the sounds of horses’ hoofs gallopin" in the distance are produced by a man playing ujxm a flagstone covered with felt, with a couple of blocks of hard wood shod with iron.

Snowstorms are not unkm zn to pantomimes. The representation of falling snow upon the stage is produced by small pieces of paper dropped slowly from a troueh which runs across the stage above the scenery. If thunder is required a sta«?e 1 nd vigorously shakes a piece of sheet-iron hung at the wings or behinu the scenes.