My wife and I have seen Penn & Teller many times since they made their off-Broadway debut in the mid-1980s, but haven’t gone back for seven years or so until this weekend. I’m glad we did. Unlike other Vegas acts, who have been doing the same tricks over and over, year after year, P&T regularly […]
This month, Showtime is airing a documentary about Johnny Thompson, one of the most famous magicians of his time. He performed (with wife Pam) as The Great Tomsoni for many years, and then became a mentor for other magicians who needed help devising illusions, figuring out how to make a trick better, or merely sharing […]
John Burbage emails: I have been a long time reader of your blog, and listener to your podcasts. Not too long ago you had a young man on who hosts the Carson Podcast (Mark Malkoff — listen here). Being as how I am 66 years old now, and of the Johnny Carson Show generation, I […]
Lance Burton and Mac King are two of the best magicians I’ve ever seen. I was first introduced to Lance’s work by Penn Jillette, who told me that Lance did the finest close-up routine (Max Maven tells me the preferred term is “stage manipulation”) in the world — high praise from the man who works […]
A few years ago, I saw a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary about magicians. I know a few people in that business and have always enjoyed the work of good illusionists and great sleight-of-hand artists, so I donated some money. The filmmakers, Marcie Hume and Christoph Baaden, spent the next few years following a quartet […]
Professor Richard Wiseman emails: For the past few months we have been working on a secret project involving the science of illusion and invisibility! In the 1920s a magician presented the plans for a strange illusion that he claimed would make people invisible. It’s based on an idea used in modern-day invisibility research and so […]