MAGICIAN BRINGS BAG OF LAUGHS TO SADDLEBACK

Stan Allen, who has been practicing magic since age 12, has learned to lean more and more on comedy: less trick, more shtick.

Allen brings his goofy brand of hocus-pocus--and his furry puppet/assistant, Stewart the rabbit--to Saddleback College in Mission Viejo tonight to join in “An Evening of Comedy, Magic and Hypnosis.” The show starts at 8 p.m. at the college’s McKinney Theatre.

“First of all, magic is a simple art,” Allen says of his craft. “Technology is moving so fast that certain art forms are going to survive because they’re simpler, and they bring us back to our childhood.

“You go and see a magician do something; you know that it’s not real. It’s almost like seeing a Spielberg movie. You know it’s all playtime, and it’s neat. You suspend that disbelief, and you just accept it.”

Allen, who lives in Los Alamitos, traces the evolution of his act by saying: “You start with things you can make at home because you can’t get anything else. If you’re going to do the cup trick, well, you use paper cups.

“And then you go through the cycle where you buy every piece of apparatus you can get your hands on, and you end up with closets full of the stuff.

“And then as you start to perform, you realize that if the box has red and black and gold paint on it and Chinese dragons painted all over it and has a weird shape, then people are suspicious of that right from the beginning.

“And if you’re really trying to fool and amaze them, the best thing to do is to eliminate those boxes and all those trick things and make everything look normal.. . .

“Now I use a cardboard box, a piece of newspaper, whatever I can to make it look normal.”

And he uses Stewart--”That’s based on rabbit stew”--who has been part of the act since 1976.

You see, Stewart, a sucker for a pretty face, does this card trick with a volunteer from the audience, and . . .. But that would be spoiling it.

At one time, Allen worked with a female assistant and performed larger, more complex illusions; he says it took him two hours to set up for a show.

Now he calls his style “relaxed.”

“The trick’s going to happen,” he says, gesturing with immaculate, graceful hands. “And it’s going to be fun, and it’s going to fool you, but all this rigmarole to get to it is what’s going to be entertaining.”

He laughs. “Thank God I stumbled into something that’s novel. Otherwise, I’d never make a living.”

It all began with a magic kit his older sister brought home from Disneyland when Allen was 12. Soon he was performing magic at birthday parties and Cub Scout shows.

A quick study at 15, he weighed his $1.35-an-hour job as a busboy against the $15 he could earn for 15 minutes of work as a magician.

The tough part was getting his mother to understand.

“She still thinks it’s a phase I’m going to outgrow,” he says.

Allen, now 35, became a comedy magician by trial and error. While performing at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, he discovered that “the shows people enjoyed most were the ones that were funny.”

He also has performed regularly on Princess Cruise ships and has played the Laff Stops in the Southern California area and other comedy clubs. For the past year, he has published a newsletter called Inside Magic.

Allen said he was inspired by his early experience with the Long Beach Mystics, a group of young magicians. With no formal training, he was fascinated by “people a little older who were going out and doing shows.. . . And I said, well, if they can do that, I can do that.”

He says he was strongly influenced by illusionist Les Arnold, who also was a member of the Long Beach group and who will be in tonight’s show. Others appearing on the bill are hypnotist Tony Angelo, comedic juggler Michael Holly and magician Tom Ogden. With plenty of comedy to provide a thread among acts, the line-up is a good mix, Allen says.

“It’s an acceptable fantasy. It’s an acceptable place for you to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy. Maybe to some degree, it’s got a little of the circus in it.”