‘It’s Magic!’ Brims With Gee-Whiz Tricks That Delight

Warning: Audience members who want to throw themselves into the action at this year’s “It’s Magic!” spectacular at the Alex Theatre, can do just that. Literally. Volunteer for the juggling act and you get juggled.

Now in its 42nd year, “It’s Magic!,” produced by Magic Castle impresario Milt Larsen and Terry Hill, and directed by Magic Castle President Dale Hindman, is an extravagant potpourri of big and little magic tricks, illusions and comedy.

Some of it is tricky and corny: Emcee Fielding West’s groaner jokes, Tom Arnold-type delivery, and casual sleight-of-hand; Roy Davenport’s kitschy reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo, complete with cannon, flags, medals, interlocking ring tricks, and slick coin and card manipulations.

Some of it is classy and jaw-dropping: James Dimmare, the picture of elegance in top hat and tails, gracefully and astonishingly makes doves appear out of thin air, accompanied by Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and aided by a glamorous assistant.

Some of it is downright edgy: buzz saws, swords, razor-sharp stakes and fire figure prominently in headliner Joaquin Ayala’s act.

There is the exotic: Omar Pasha, with his colorful “black art” from India, creates colorful and whimsical black-light illusions of floating boxes, assistants who lose their heads, a poster that comes to life and a leaping candle flame.

And then there’s the classy, edgy, jaw-dropping and hilarious Passing Zone--Jon Wee and Owen Morse, an award-winning juggling duo who upstage everyone.

Wee and Morse light up the stage with remarkably complex club-juggling and a steady stream of genuinely comic banter. They turn one audience volunteer into a torch-spinning, plate-spinning foil for a wicked sickle exchange, and then they bring down the house with people-juggling.

Broadly played for laughs, this full-production number stars three volunteers from the audience dressed in bulky astronaut suits who are ushered onstage in an atmospheric cloud of white mist. Attached to cables, they’re sent flying out over the stage in precise and varying patterns by the pair, to the portentous swell of Strauss--the “2001: A Space Odyssey” theme.

Racing from astronaut to astronaut (think of how plate-spinning works), Wee and Morse keep the volunteers from crashing into each other and then finish off the effect by hurling giant balls past them. The illusion that the trio are orbiting planets is a howl.

The dramatic Ayala performs a few pretty illusions with scarves, silk fans and bits of paper, and has a charmingly playful interlude with audience volunteers. But he serves up the big, fiery finale.

Dressed in black leather and high boots, he wields swords, passes through a metal wall and escapes from a box pierced by giant buzz saws. His lithe wife, Lilia (dressed, or rather undressed, variously in tiny scraps of leather, vinyl or spandex), survives stabbings, dismemberment and an impaling--the big collective-gasp moment of the evening. Ouch.

More of the elegant Dimmare and less of the mildly scatological Fielding, with his tongue-in-cheek cruelty-to-animals tricks would be a plus, but otherwise this show is a gee-whiz, how’d-they-do-it blast.

*

* “It’s Magic!,” Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, tonight at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 6:30 p.m. $20-$30. (800) 233-3123. Running time: 2 1/2 hours.