O.C. STAGE REVIEW : Turning Magic Into Schlock : David Copperfield’s show presents not only seamlessly slick high-tech tricks, but adolescent fantasy at its most arch.

Editor’s note: David Copperfield refused to allow The Times to photograph his performance.

Undoubtedly, your grade school included at least one shy, unpopular kid who turned to store-bought magic tricks as a way to win some attention from his more sociable classmates.

If that kid’s wildest fantasies had been indulged, would he have grown up to be President? A gunslinging sociopath? Or David Copperfield?

Copperfield’s latest show, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center through Wednesday, presents not only seamlessly slick high-tech magic, but adolescent fantasy at its most arch.

For this isn’t a magician content merely to saw a beautiful woman in half; he wants to make love to her afterward. And he wants you to know that he did.

Through more than a dozen elaborately staged acts, we followed Copperfield into erotic vignettes draped in the exotica of a medieval Japan, an Art Deco Gotham, an Amazonian rain forest.

Resembling rock videos more than parlor tricks (the show is titled “Magic for the ‘90s,” after all), the acts were choreographed to place Copperfield at the center of a bevy of gorgeous female assistants. With the songs of Peter Gabriel, Aerosmith and the like providing the beat, Copperfield and his women sensually danced their way to climax after climax--in each case, a conventional magic trick draped in stagecraft worthy of Broadway’s greatest excess.

Displaying both an unparalleled sleight-of-hand and a machismo that bordered on parody, Copperfield beheaded (and restored) one of his young loves, levitated another on the streams of a fountain and ran swords through a third who was encased in a box (she reappeared intact afterward).

When through with their ordeals at Copperfield’s hand, the nameless beauties would embrace him, pressing their heads to his chest as he wrapped his arms around them, as if posing for the cover of a romance novel or science-fiction paperback.

In one particularly memorable act, two women joined Copperfield at a large wheel that evoked the dancing image of the Indian god Shiva. While one woman writhed suggestively at his feet, Copperfield placed himself behind the wheel as the other woman appeared to draw herself through his abdomen.

But Copperfield’s show was as much Vegas as it was Broadway and MTV. Between the set pieces, the magician would recruit audience volunteers--disproportionately young women in a crowd made up largely of children and older adults--to assist in complicated illusions.

He bantered suggestively with the Heathers, Melissas and Eileens he drew from the audience (one was asked to pull a pair of scissors that Copperfield had deliberately placed behind his belt buckle; another was instructed, with a wink, to spread her legs “wide apart,” ostensibly to steady her stance before she fired a pistol). At the same time, the magician performed outsize card tricks (one involved interplay with a film of Orson Welles), gave remarkable prophesies (he predicted what audience members would spray on a wall) and, for a silver-haired woman named Fern, turned a tissue into a rose as he stood right in the middle of the audience.

But while the low-level innuendo and spectacular theatrics kept the show moving, it was a descent into schmaltz that brought the audience to its feet.

To a violin soundtrack, Copperfield sat down under a spotlight on a darkened stage to tell a transparent allegory of his childhood desire to fly. After the syrupy chat that equated flight with self-esteem, Copperfield spread his wings and flew across the stage, up and down, turned somersaults and, in a strangely religious pose, spread his arms outward while levitating over center stage.

And as if the Peter Pan subtext of the show wasn’t yet quite clear, Copperfield took an audience member--named, of all things, Wednesday, if not quite Wendy--into his arms and flew the breathless girl across the stage.

Did anybody believe? Well, they all clapped their hands, for what seemed an eternity.

“David Copperfield: Magic for the ‘90s” appears through Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $16.50-$29.50. (714) 556-2787.