OCR Text |
Show Wonderful Marionettes. (Philadelphia Record.) "The ingenuity of some of the handlers hand-lers of marionettes," said a showman, "is incredible. I know a man who conducts a marionette theatre, wherein an orchestra orches-tra of eight pieces plays under marionette leadership, while in the boxes a dozen marionette spectators laugh and applaud, and on the stage a' marionette drama briskly enacts itself. The conductor of all this Btanda. exposed to the wn.lr. at the back of the stage, and apparently he is motionless, though really each finger of both hands and the majority of his toes of both feet are working with unexampled unex-ampled rapidity. For each marionette is connected by a string with a toe or a finger of the operator, and this string sometimes has as many as ten or fifteen branches, joined to the manikin's face, body, arms, legs, etc., so that it may dance, smile, wave its arms and do a number of other life-like things. One of these figures, indeed, is connected by thirty-two strings to the operator. It is bewildering to think of the number of strings there must be altogether, and really it is impossible to conceive of the dexterity and the thought required in the artistic manipulation of a band of marionettes." |