Magicians Are Appearing All Over, Almost as if by Magic

If it’s beginning to seem that magicians suddenly are as plentiful as the rabbits in their hats, it’s no illusion.

Just look around:

-- Six shows by superstar TV magician David Copperfield at the Orange County Performing Arts Center last weekend weren’t enough to meet demand, so a seventh was added. Commanding ticket prices of $15 to $24, Copperfield zapped $400,000 or more out of the pockets of the curious. (Now that’s a trick I’d like to master.)

-- After years as a members-only club, Magic Island, Newport Beach’s answer to the popular Magic Castle in Los Angeles, has begun allowing the general public to say “Open Sesame” at its doors.

-- All week long, a prestidigitator known only as “Christopher, the Man of Mystery” has been touring local libraries giving free magic shows for kiddies.

-- And meanwhile, magicians are materializing more frequently at nightclubs, as it finally seems to be dawning on club owners that female wrestlers frolicking in 30-weight Pennzoil somehow fail to lure discriminating clientele.

If this is a trend, I’m delighted to see it. There can never be too much magic in life.

It’s said that the one quality separating human beings from all other life forms is our ability to reason. I’ve always thought it was that we can learn card tricks.

Most folks, I think, become fascinated with magic sometime during childhood--when everything seems possible and cold-eyed reality has yet to set in. That’s when it took hold of me. My father used to do a couple of simple sleight-of-hand tricks that were nothing short of spectacular to a 5-year-old. And anytime I went to Disneyland, the climax of the day was stopping on the way out at the magic shop on Main Street, U.S.A. I still own a deck of “invisible” cards I bought there--the kind that looks like a regular deck upon first riffle, but then with a quick cut all the backs and faces go blank.

I’ve missed being able to see accomplished magicians and illusionists live. By bringing their acts to television, the likes of Copperfield and Doug Henning reach more people in one night than Harry Houdini played to in his entire life. But magic on TV? C’mon--TV is magic. Wouldn’t Houdini have loved a little box that can produce live pictures from India or China? Or that allows the user to bring the President of the United States or the Queen of England into his own living room (and, best of all, lets him turn them off at will)?

It’s hard to work up much excitement for a TV show where Copperfield is making an airplane disappear when, with just a flip of the channel, you can watch Darth Vader vaporize an entire planet.

When you think about it, it’s as comical as Woody Allen’s joke about a group of truly hep characters who sit around listening to Marcel Marceau records. The medium subverts the message, although that didn’t stop Copperfield’s latest TV special from luring millions to watch him make a barge vanish in the Bermuda Triangle. (And I always thought they disappeared just fine out there without any help from Dave.)

In one sense, as Times reader Greg Crow of Anaheim points out, the concept of magic on TV is perfectly logical, since TV evolved from radio, and radio is where Edgar Bergen had a quite successful career--as a ventriloquist.

Still, magic should be performed in front of a live audience and the more intimate the setting, the better.

Magic Island offers a revolving contingent of sleight-of-hand artists, illusionists, magician-comics, psychics, Tarot readers and handwriting analysts. The performers I saw on a recent tour of the elegant club and restaurant ranged from nervously competent to devilishly smooth, but it was magic as it was meant to be--up close and personal.

When you’re just a few feet away from some modern-day Merlin, it’s far more compelling to try to figure out how he made that wedding band materialize out of thin air.

That’s where someone like Copperfield sells the tradition of magic short. Where’s the magic in claiming to make the Statue of Liberty disappear on a TV screen?

With a trick that stupendous, you really had to be there, and even then, we know that Lady Liberty didn’t really go anywhere.

But with the smaller-scale stuff, there’s a compartment in the brain, somewhere just to the left and a little behind the skeptic nerve, where we hold on to the possibility that maybe it wasn’t merely an illusion.

Like that invisible deck I bought 20 years ago at Disneyland. I’ve read the instructions. I know the secret. But whenever I see those cards turn blank, I still think it’s magic.