For Lance Burton, Las Vegas Success Is Just Magical--and No Illusion

With the wave of a hand, Lance Burton can make a herd of elephants or a B-2 Stealth bomber disappear.

He has been bound in a straitjacket and sealed in a tank filled with water. He’s been chained to roller coaster tracks and he’s been buried alive.

But his greatest trick may have been his own unlikely transformation: from toiling in seedy adult nightclubs and rural amusement parks in Kentucky to headlining one of the most dynamic and popular shows on the Las Vegas strip.

“I feel like I’m the luckiest person alive,” Burton says as he munches a quick meal between his 7 and 10 p.m. shows, which he performs five nights a week in a $27-million theater bearing his name. “I’m always waiting for that phone call: ‘Hello. We’ve just realized you’re really a no-talent hillbilly. We’ve made a horrible mistake and we’d like you to leave now.’ ”

From the moment he emerges from a smoke-filled glass case until he leaves the stage behind the wheel of a floating Corvette, Burton has the audience mesmerized. His down-home charm and sharp wit serve as an entertaining soundtrack to his visual showcase.

“I was born and raised in Louisville, Ky.,” he tells the applauding crowd. “Thank you, hillbillies. I’m actually very well known in Kentucky. I’m the only person with a tuxedo.”

From there, Burton leads the audience through 90 minutes of illusions that become more and more elaborate.

At one point, Burton vanishes from the stage only to materialize moments later atop a chandelier hanging in the center of the theater.

“How did you do that?” yells a man in the audience as Burton returns to the stage.

“Sorry, sir, but if I told you, I’d have to kill you,” he replies.

“Then tell my wife,” the man shouts back, evoking a burst of laughter from Burton and the rest of the audience.

Burton, now 40, recently celebrated his fourth anniversary at the Monte Carlo Hotel and Casino, which signed him to an unprecedented 13-year, $100-million-plus contract and built a 1,260-seat theater to his specifications.

“It’s been an interesting ride,” Burton says. “It’s one of those things that’s been so strange that no one could make it up.”

The story begins 35 years ago, as a 5-year-old Burton attends a magic show at a Christmas party for the employees of Louisville’s Frito-Lay plant. Magician Harry Collins needs a child from the audience to serve as an assistant.

“He started pulling silver dollars out from behind my ears, and I thought it was just amazing,” Burton recalls. “I didn’t understand that it was just a trick and was wondering how I’d missed all that money. I told my mother that I’d found a great way to make a living.”

He spent the next several years, with Collins as mentor, learning tricks and performing shows in the basement of his home for friends and neighbors--for a nickel a person. By the time he reached high school, he was performing in nightclubs around Louisville.

He enrolled at the University of Louisville, studying theater arts and refining his skills. Burton honed his 12-minute act at a theme park in southern Kentucky and even a downtown Louisville strip club.

At 20, he got his first big break. He won the Gold Medal Award for Excellence from the International Brotherhood of Magicians, the world’s largest magic society, which brought him a two-week gig in Los Angeles.

That led to the chance of a lifetime--an invitation to perform on “The Tonight Show.”

“That was surreal,” he says. “I just couldn’t fathom that two weeks earlier I had been working at a rural Kentucky amusement park and a strip club in Louisville. Now Johnny Carson is introducing me to the world.”

That appearance, in turn, got him a job with the Folies Bergere, the longest-running show in Las Vegas, where he ended up staying nine years.

“When I first started there, all I had was my 12-minute act with the birds, cards and some candles,” he says. Over time, he added material and eventually had enough to do his own show.

Five years at the Hacienda Hotel followed, during which he perfected the act.

In 1996 Burton performed his first show at the Monte Carlo and has since proven to be one of Las Vegas’ most popular entertainers.

“He’s got a tremendous amount of stage presence and charisma,” says Las Vegas comedian and magician Mac King. “He’s also got an interesting combination of down-home warmth and genuineness that people seem to gravitate to.”

Burton’s charity work with the Shriners Hospital and Habitat for Humanity earned him the title of “Favorite Male Las Vegan” by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

He returns to Kentucky to see his parents, and last year he was in Louisville to perform several sold-out shows and to tape his latest television special, “Lance Burton, Master Magician: On The Road,” which will air later this year.

Despite performing 10 shows a week, Burton says wowing audiences never gets boring.

“It’s new and different every night,” he says. “The charge you get from a good audience is like nothing else.”

At least once a day, he says, people in the audience ask, “How did you do that?”

“They’ll say they want to know but they don’t, really,” Burton says. “When they find out, they’re always disappointed. They’re imagining something clever and spectacular. When they realize how the trick is really done, they’ll say things like ‘Is that all?’ or ‘I can’t believe that fooled me.’ ”