The Final Illusion of the Great Lafayette
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2023
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Golden sparks are raining down on the Great Lafayette’s famous vaudeville show, “The Lion’s Bride”. They look like they’re part of the performance. They aren’t — and soon the theater is ablaze. The manager has to figure out how to save the 3000 audience members, now trapped in a burning building.
Thirty-five years earlier, the Brooklyn Theatre had gone up in flames too. The terrified spectators became a frantic, trampling mass, and hundreds perished in the flames and smoke. Panic in an emergency can kill. But keeping calm can also be lethal.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The most marvelous and thrilling spectacle ever produced, introducing majesty, the |
| 0:21.0 | Hansomist Lion in captivity. Here is 1901 and the owner of the Hansomist |
| 0:30.7 | Lion in captivity is a man built by the theatre as the world's greatest |
| 0:36.1 | entertainer, a great Lafayette. That was his actual name, by the way. He had it |
| 0:41.9 | legally changed. He signed his letters TG Lafayette and the world's greatest |
| 0:48.0 | entertainer. It sounds like hyperbole but it might have been true. He certainly |
| 0:53.0 | became one of the wealthiest as Ian Robertson and Gordon Rutter describe in |
| 0:57.2 | their book The Death and Life of the Great Lafayette. By his life's end, Lafayette |
| 1:03.2 | was pulling in the equivalent of something like 20 million dollars a year. |
| 1:08.0 | Akundra, painter, sculptor, actor, mimic, an illusionist and a pantomimist said |
| 1:14.1 | in one newspaper, audience has certainly got their money's worth when they |
| 1:17.8 | caught his act. The great Lafayette's signature performance was the Lion's |
| 1:23.4 | bride, a 25 minute extravaganza with a cast and crew of dozens. The most |
| 1:29.9 | wonderful spectacle that the Vorderville stage has ever seen. The Lion's |
| 1:35.4 | bride told the story of a beautiful young woman captured by a wealthy |
| 1:39.9 | Sultan and given a terrible choice. Marry him or be fed to the Lion. Right on |
| 1:47.5 | cue the Lion Raw's angrily so would you if you were getting electric shocks to |
| 1:53.0 | your paws. Feed me to the Lion then says the woman encouraged by her dashing |
| 1:58.3 | lover Lafayette. I'll save you, he vows. The Sultan throws the |
| 2:04.5 | woman into the cage and here comes the Lion leaping on her but somehow unnoticed |
| 2:09.9 | by the audience the real Lion has been swapped out. It's Lafayette now in a |
| 2:14.8 | Lion costume. The magician reveals himself and rescues his sweetheart. The show is a |
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