https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8081yVOG5U

LONDON — “The majority of the technicians who worked in the theater were in the Navy,” said Christopher Baugh, theater historian at the Victoria and Albert Museum. “It was exactly the technology of merchant trading ships: of large sheets of canvas supported on timber batten with spars, cranks, pulleys, counterweights, etc. So the whole stage was a technology of tricks and devices to enable scenes to be changed almost miraculously.” The museum presents an Eighteenth Century mechanical theater in its newest exhibition, “Opera: Passion, Power and Politics,” which follows the origins of the opera in late-Renaissance Italy to present day. The grand show will regale viewers with a galleon drifting through a stormy sea with rolling waves and fantastical mermaids. The exhibition is on through February 25, 2018. For more information, www.vam.ac.uk.