Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✩✩✩
created by Simon Painter, directed by Neil Dorward
• David Mirvish, Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
December 14, 2016-January 7, 2017;
• Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
December 12, 2017-January 7, 2018
“Like Watching Television in the Theatre”
The show may be called The Illusionists - Live from Broadway, but you spend more than half the time you’re in the theatre watching a huge 10-by-30-foot LED monitor suspended over the stage in order to see some illusions more closely or in order to see some illusions at all. This is true even if you are sitting, as I was, in what are designated “premium seats” in the Princess of Wales Theatre. “It’s an awfully expensive way to watch television”, my partner commented, and that is absolutely true. It really doesn’t matter if The Illusionists have a videographer on stage to film what they do live for the screen. Filming mediates an experience because you can to experience an event by means of another person’s point of view and in another medium. This is deadly in the realm of magic where establishing the authenticity of what you are seeing is of the highest importance.
The first version of The Illusionists premiered in Sydney, Australia, in 2012. It was the idea of producer Simon Painter to bring together a rotating cast of seven magicians from around the world to present a show with a unified style, thus a kind of Cirque du Soleil for magicians. The current show premiered in 2015. The seven magicians are given nicknames as if they were members of some league of superheroes. Italian Andrew Basso is dubbed The Escapologist, Scotsman Colin Cloud is The Deductionist, American Jeff Hobson is The Trickster, another American Kevin James is The Inventor, Canadian Darcy Oake is The Grand Illusionist, a third American Dan Sperry is The Anti-Conjuror and South Korean Yu Ho-Jin is The Manipulator.
Costume designer Angela Aaron has lent the show a vaguely edgy, futuristic style through the punk-influenced black leather costumes she gives the seven assistants/dancers who populate the empty black space of the stage and through the eccentric, punk-to-steam punk outfits she uses to differentiate the seven magicians. The score by by Evan Jolly remains mostly in the punk/heavy metal sphere until is suddenly becomes delicately impressionist for the sleight-of-hand sequences. The general atmosphere is urban and dystopian, not at all relaxed or genteel.
Three magicians are given only a single time slot to fill while the others make recurrent appearances. The first group includes Andrew Basso, who recreates Houdini’s famous Chinese Water Torture Cell escape. Basso is handcuffed and his feet locked in a the top of a tall glass box filled with water into which he is lowered armed only with a paperclip. Houdini performed the trick with curtains around the box to spare the audience from witnessing his potential demise. Basso dispenses with the curtains and allows the troupe’s resident videographer to shoot close-ups of his fiddling the various locks with his paperclip. On the one hand it is amazing to see that Basso can escape from such a situation in under three minutes. On the other hand, the video showing us exactly what Basso does to escape renders the trick entire devoid of mystery. One could applaud his daring and his ability to hold his breath and pick locks, but the jets of flame that go off when he takes his bows cloud his actual achievement with bombast.
Mentalist Colin Cloud is also given his own moment to shine. Most of his stunts in guessing people’s birthdays and pets names are inexplicable. His final routine would be fantastic if he stopped just just before one last revelation involving the house programme. That revelation unfortunately gives away a key to the long set-up of the routine and severely dampens the effect.
Canadians were likely most looking forward to seeing the Darcy Oake sequence, however, three of his large-scale illusions involving appearances on a platform against the all-black background, were too easy to decipher. His most impressive act was a display of sleight of hand whereby he made toonies disappear and somehow fall into one glass fully covered by another. Such tabletop magic could be seen only on video on the large screen overheard, an ironic circumstance given that Oake had just mentioned what a pity it was that most children’s first experience of magic is on television.
The most impressive of all the magicians is Yu Ho-Jin. Dressed in slim-cut formal wear with tails, you is the most elegantly dressed of the group. He takes off his white evening scarf folds it up and suddenly it becomes a card. From that point on cards appear everywhere. Fans of cards unfold from his hands and eventually he is shooting single cards off from both hands in incredibly beautiful and mind-boggling profusion. Yu is brought back for an encore of tabletop magic, which though fascinating can only be viewed on the overhead screen.
The poster image of Kevin James makes him look like some sort of steampunk Goldfinger. In fact, he he soft-spoken and quite affable. His two large-scale illusions involve constructing a man from inanimate parts and accidentally sawing a man in half with a chainsaw only to put him together again. Neither is particularly convincing or awe-inspiring. His best trick is the close-up magic he performs for one child chosen from the audience in which he makes a crumpled piece of paper dance on his hand right before her eyes. As with all the close-up magic, the audience can see this only by watching the overhead screen.
His next appearance begins with a lot of negative grumbling about “magic tricks” and what kids expect from them. He chooses an audience member to help him all the while adopting a an aggressively satiric stance towards her much unlike the generally supportive patter used by conventional magicians. In this, the grossest act of the evening, he has the audience member mark a toonie and then makes it disappear by pushing it through his eyelids between the eyeball and the socket. He then makes the same coin reappear by cutting across his left forearm to show the coin inside the skin amid the blood. The disappearance and reappearance were both too repellent for me to watch. Teens and some adults may find the gross-out nature of the act creepy but fun, but it is certainly not for little kids. You would not want them imitating Sperry’s actions at home in any way.
In his final appearance Sperry redeems his deliberately disturbing image with a fantastic display of sleight of hand to some ear-splitting industrial metal. He makes silks turn into pigeons and back again, change colour, change into balls or canes and back with unbelievable rapidity. If, up to this point, you thought Sperry’s main talent was for alienating the viewers, this frenetic tour de force proves that he actually is a master conjuror who simply sports an off-putting image.
At the end of two hours it turns out that there have been only two sequences of truly impressive magic – Yu’s seemingly infinite ability to produce cards from his fingertips and Sperry’s ability to change anything into pigeons and back. Significantly, neither of these involved use of the videographer or the overhead screen.
Darcy Oake is right that it is a shame that most people’s experience of magic nowadays is on television. The terrible irony of The Illusionists is that most people’s experience of the show will be watching the action on video. At the moment Toronto is lucky that there is another magic show in town where no video is involved. David Ben performs his show Hocus Pocus in a theatre seating only 207. The effect of live magic in a small space unmediated by videography is immeasurably greater than is the spectacle of magic acts performed in a theatre seating 2000 requiring video for some acts even to be seen.
If you wish to introduce your children to live magic, seek out a small-scale low-tech magic show. There is much in The Illusionists that is not child-friendly and all the noise of the soundtrack, the smoke and the pretence will produce exactly the negative effect of empty showmanship to which the phrase “smoke and mirrors” refers.
*Note: The performer line-up for the December 2017-January 2018 stop in Toronto is as follows:
• Darcy Oake – The Grand Illusionist
• Jeff Hobson – The Trickster
• An Ha Lim – The Manipulator
• Charlie Frye – The Eccentric
• Raymond Crowe – The Unusualist
• Colin Cloud – The Deductionist
• Jonathan Goodwin – The Daredevil
©Christopher Hoile
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes, including intermission.
Tour stops after Toronto 2018:
•Appell Center, York, PA
Jan 28, 2018;
• Tennessee PAC, Nashville, TN
Feb. 16-18, 2018;
• Lexington Opera House, lexington, KY
February 20-21, 2018
• The Bushnell, Hartford, CT
May 4-6, 2018;
•Durham PAC, Durham, NC
May 11-12, 2018
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Colin Cloud, Kevin James, Dan Sperry, Darcy Oake, Jeff Hobson, Andrew Basso and Yu Ho-Jin, ©2016 MagicSpace Entertainment; Jeff Hobson, ©2016 Joan Marcus; Yu Ho-Jin, ©2016 MagicSpace Entertainment; Dan Sperry, ©2016 Joan Marcus.
For tickets, visit www.theillusionistslive.com.
2016-12-22
The Illusionists - Live from Broadway