HECTOR MANCHA: THIS IS NOT MAGIC

☆☆☆

Hector Mancha transforms the Scottish Storytelling Centre’s stage over the course of This Is Not Magic. The space starts completely empty, giving no hint as to what is to come, but by the end is covered by a carpet of discarded cards and crisps in almost equal measure. This chaotic staging perfectly matches the organized chaos of the show. The premise is that Mancha will teach the audience magic, and he uses this to show just enough to increase the surprise of his reveals.

That being said, perhaps the most impressive aspect of the performance is how well Mancha incorporates various audience interruptions in to his act. Future audiences should be advised that if they sit in Mancha’s first row and take off their shoes they may receive a brief foot massage included in the price of their ticket—although they may also find their discarded shoes temporarily abducted. Less lucky audience members with a blocked noses do not need to worry about loudly blowing their nose during the performance, Mancha will incorporate the sound effect in to the show. These improvised moments bring Mancha’s show to life, making his audience feel fully incorporated in his act.

Those invited to join Mancha onstage are treated with equal friendliness. In the reviewed show Mancha bonds especially well with an Argentinian tourist who ends up helping out for a couple different tricks. In one sequence with her Mancha proves himself immune to the mild germaphobia that affects most of us post covid, eating discarded crisps off the floor of the stage that they have both been stepping on. An even riskier gambit involves relying on an audience member managing to video call a friend to participate—but Mancha gets his videochat in the end, for an especially exciting conclusion to his longest running effect.

Magically, Mancha mostly always fools his audience when he wants to. If a can of soda is occasionally spotted slightly earlier than it is revealed it hardly affects the overall effect of his performance. His most riveting piece is not magic in the usual sense but a shadow puppetry effect set to music, a highly unusual but hugely enjoyable inclusion in the show.

The aspects of the performance that make Mancha stand out—his inclusion of the full audience and his shadow puppetry—may not be traditionally magic effects (although audience management is an important element of all magic shows). These cement Mancha’s status as a unique performer well worth an hour of his audience’s time.

LEWIS BARLOW: THE WAY OF THE MAGICIAN

☆☆☆☆

As much as everyone loves a plot-driven magic show, sometimes a magic fan is in the mood for the classic: a series of tricks loosely tied together by stories that the magician happens to find interesting. The Way of the Magician is the perfect show for those occasions. Lewis Barlow is faultless in his performance of a variety of card and coin tricks, often themed on characters from his life or magical history.

Barlow excels at his card finding and trick dealing in particular. The audience expects him to find the cards they choose, nothing is more basic in the performance of magic, yet Barlow finds a way to display that concept in new, increasingly interesting ways—proving that he can surprise and amaze, even regardless of whether or not collects the chosen card back from his participant. More “practical” displays of trick dealing prove fascinating as well, linking in with Barlow’s brief but fascinating educational segment on a historical card cheat.

New technology abounds at Magicfest. Barlow makes great use of a live camera stream to make sure that his magic is visible to the whole audience. This results in several wholesome moments in the show. Early troubles with the camera bring local celebrity and Magicfest big boss Kevin Quantum to the rescue, in a display of Quantum’s hands-on care and support for the artists in his festival. Later on Barlow takes a second to admire how good his card tricks look on the big screen—a well-deserved moment of self love. The audience concurs with his assessment.

Audience members are treated well by Barlow. They are often used to simply choose a card from their seats, perhaps a wise time saving move to reduce show time spent waiting for large numbers of participants to shuffle back and forth down the rows of seats. With so many card finding tricks, this is a significant factor. When choosing individuals to actually join him on stage Barlow kindly opens the floor to volunteers in the first instance, allowing for a very enthusiastic young audience member to experience the magic up close.

If The Way of the Magician indicates anything about what it’s like to be a magician, it’s implicitly, in the freedom that Barlow takes in creating a show out of random things that he likes and finds interesting. Maybe sometimes that’s all that is needed. 

More information on Lewis Barlow can be found here.

NEIL KELSO: SOUNDS IMPOSSIBLE – A MUSICAL MAGIC SHOW

☆☆☆☆

Magicians are inherently nerds, regardless of whether or not they lean in to it in their shows. In the more interesting shows they might reveal their nerdiness about something other than magic, and Neil Kelso does in Sounds Impossible: A Musical Magic Show. His discussion of musical theory will probably be new to just about everyone in the audience, even those of us who learned piano casually as children. While the magic is itself impressive, it is a secondary aspect of the performance, enhancing the discussion and performance of music. This is to Kelso’s benefit, setting him apart and making for an especially interesting show.

The magic starts classically and visibly, with a trick that happens both in Kelso’s hands and in the hands of his audience members. However, a highlight of the show is the perfect combination of the musical and magical aspects in a card finding effect that uses the piano to find the cards. An audience member in the front row of the reviewed show had a satisfying reaction as the magic revealed itself, gasping loudly and clutching her partner’s arm. Seeing that Kelso can provoke this reaction in his audience is a reminder to frequent magic show attendees of how it feels to see these incredible feats for the first time.

Kelso evidentially knows at least as much about the history of pianos and music as he does about magic, and it’s great to get to hear some of this knowledge from him. He covers everything from historical differences in tuning standards—listing a few famous composers and describing how the instruments of their day would be tuned higher or lower than the one he plays on—to the effects of air pollution and recent research in to how to potentially counteract it, for example how living under a flight path might affect people. The magic draws people in, but once they are there they may wish that more of the performance were dedicated to this musical education.

Sounds Impossible: A Musical Magic Show does indeed sound impossible at first, but Kelso pulls off the premise and more. With a broad appeal, he gets people from both sides—impressing the magic fans with his breadth of music knowledge and the music fans with the magic tricks. He has a pretty universal appeal. Fans of either aspect of his performance will be sure to see something new.

ALEX KOUVATAS: SOMETHING IS MISSING

☆☆☆

The 2021 Fringe didn’t feel like a real Fringe, and there is a noticeable trend of some performers re-doing their prior shows for those who missed them last year. Alex Kouvatas joins them with his 2021 debut, Something is Missing. If he is a bit less popular this year it is probably because he was so popular last year, Edinburghers and regular Fringe-goers will have already seen him, plus apparent venue troubles may have resulted in difficulty in finding him. However, for those who manage to seek him out it is worth the effort.

With a small audience at the reviewed show, Kouvatas was able to get everyone involved. The first participant in particular was especially excited to join him, waving to her friends and posing for their cameras. The effect that she was involved in is a highlight, showcasing Kouvatas’s excellent ability to weave his tricks in to stories—in this case a magical, non-threatening take on William Tell shooting an apple off of someone’s head. While there is less of a theme running through the show this year, which is missed, that storytelling remains a strong point.

With his venue change, and falling victim to the small audience plague that is running rampant throughout this year’s Fringe, one would think that Kouvatas had more than enough misfortune to deal with. However, unfortunately at the reviewed show he also had trouble with his table, which dramatically broke part of the way through the show. He managed to play this off admirably well—the audience seemed to half expect him to wave a plastic wand and the table would restore itself. However, it was just a misfortune. Aside from the incident itself the show did not appear to suffer for the lack of the table.

Despite the misfortune surrounding this year’s iteration of Something is Missing, Kouvatas’s passion and showmanship shine through. He has clearly been hard at work, he no longer has to refer to a script and has a more consistently strong transition between tricks. While the theme and ideas behind the prior iteration are missed, these may be a casualty of the troubles Kouvatas faced this year. The overall improvement in his performance is noticeable. The show reviewed was towards the end of this year’s Fringe, but hopefully he has better luck next year.  Kouvatas deserves to reach a wider audience.

JAMES PHELAN: THE GREATEST MAGICIAN

☆☆☆

Magicians like to give the impression that they control every last second of their shows, but the one thing that they can never fully control is their audience. On the day that The Greatest Magician was reviewed James Phelan spent a lot of his time playing whack-a-mole with unruly audience participants. His crowd control was a bit hit or miss, if he was a little sharp with the odd individual the audience as a whole generally felt that they deserved it, this did seem to affect the kind of people who volunteered to join him, which may have exacerbated the issue. Nevertheless, through all of this Phelan managed to keep the audience on his side and get through a series of impressive tricks.

The audience management was probably the more impressive feat. Phelan had audience participants misunderstanding his instructions, he invited up wannabe comedians… it was the full range of troublesome participants. While getting understandably a bit annoyed at first, by the end of the show he was handling this with grace. He allowed the self-appointed comedian to tell his joke, “I went in to a spaghetti restaurant and tried to steal some spaghetti, but there was a security guard and I couldn’t get pasta”, before inviting him to leave the stage. And he ran through as many participants as necessary for his initial card trick, patiently waiting to find enough participants sober enough to help him out—surprisingly a difficult task on a Friday afternoon (you can add in a joke about Scottish drinking culture if you’d like).

Magically, Phelan describes the inspiring influence of his uncle, Paul Daniels. His adorable childhood photos are a highlight regardless of whether or not the viewers previously knew of Daniels. Hearing about a magician’s childhood inspiration to perform magic is not unusual, but the way Phelan connects it to his tricks is especially satisfying. Phelan’s trick involving making his participants forget how to read is fun to watch.  However, after he follows it up with a story about performing this effect on a teacher who told him he would never make it as a magician the audience surely appreciates it even more. 

Whether or not Phelan is truly The Greatest Magician is up for the audience to decide, but he is definitely a resilient performer.  Managing to keep his show on track in spite of numerous attempts to derail it, however lightheartedly, can not be easy.  Phelan will impress his audience no matter how much they might try to resist. 

ARRON JONES: ONE HOUR STRAIGHTJACKET ESCAPE MAGIC SHOW

☆☆☆☆

Arron Jones performs a few pieces of scary magic in his One Hour Straightjacket Escape Magic Show, but perhaps the scariest feature is how much of the show is left in the hands of his audience participants. This presents an interesting unstated theme. Like all magicians Jones presumably put a lot of effort in to creating this show, and from the start he places his trust in these strangers—albeit strangers who wandered in to the back of a pub just to see him—to carry out the bulk of the fulfillment of his creation. It’s a kind of wholesome, calculated laziness.

The only people who will be disappointed with this show will be those who genuinely wanted to watch a man struggle to escape a straightjacket for a full hour—while Jones does eventually make his way out, the majority of the hour is spent with him apparently content to be tied up. Those of us hoping for creatively themed magic under this unusual self-imposed restriction will have no complaints.

By and large Jones’s trust in his audience is justified. Anyone who has tried to talk someone else through a new task will know the sheer variety of unpredictable ways that people mess up at unfamiliar instructions, and Jones does indeed come up against this—early on in the reviewed show. He deals with this well enough, not breaking character, and the participant in question both has a good time and eventually figured out how to do the task requested of him.

A highlight is a card trick that culminates in an assisted striptease for an exciting reveal. The participant chosen for this looked thrilled to be helping him. Like most of us, she had been enjoying Jones’s custom music that accompanied a lot of his set up and transition times, and her visible enthusiasm made her a fantastic choice to share the stage with him.

The risk of going to a show titled as One Hour Straightjacket Escape Magic Show is that it turns in to a repetitive rehashing of the magician escaping from various binds. Jones does not fall in to this category, instead having put together one of the most creative of the magazine-style magic shows at this fringe. The straightjacket restricts his movements but he more than rises to the challenge. This is the magic show to see if you think you’ve seen it all.

MAGIC GARETH’S MAGIC EYE

☆☆☆☆

The Edinburgh-renowned Magic Gareth managed all but a full house on a sunny Edinburgh Sunday morning—the first magical feat of the reviewed performance of Magic Gareth’s Magic Eye. The one potential critique of the show is both immediately obvious at the start of the show while not being at all his fault, that due to the shape of the stage and audience layout individuals who chose to sit at the far edges are unable to see Gareth on stage. There is a brief moment of shuffling around when he first comes on, and future audiences are advised to arrive early and get central seats. That being said, the rest of the show—the bits that Gareth has control over—are difficult to fault. Even the smallest members of his audience are happily engaged for the full hour.

Gareth’s magic and child-friendly stunts consistently amaze, and get the whole audience involved. His fun take on Russian roulette culminates in a surprise that, from personal experience, is a refreshing treat for a hot summer day. And when he has an extra special prop to show off he makes sure to run around the whole audience so that everyone gets a chance to touch it. This prop’s use results in one of the visual highlights of the show, featuring Gareth using a hilarious makeshift blindfold to show off his skills without using sight. Cameras came out up and down the audience as everyone wanted their memento.

Given his reputation as a children’s performer it would be expected that Gareth is good with the children in his audience, and he is indeed great with them. He involves the little ones at every possible opportunity, making them feel important without giving them anything too taxing or stressful to do. His final words onstage are especially sweet for the kids, making sure that every single person in his audience leaves the show feeling special.

Magic Gareth is so well known as a children’s performer that even us Edinburghers without children of our own have often heard of him, and in Magic Gareth’s Magic Eye he more than lives up to his reputation. Children’s entertainment doesn’t get much better than this.

More information on Magic Gareth can be found here.

CAMERON GIBSON: MYSTERIES; AN HOUR OF IMPOSSIBILITIES

☆☆☆☆

If previous years’ trends are anything to go by, Fringe goers love watching a beautiful and stylish Scottish mentalist read people’s minds.  For all in search of this, Cameron Gibson is the mentalist to go to this year.  There is more to recommend him than just physical beauty—he is also a funny and compelling performer.  In his wordily titled Mysteries; An Hour of Impossibilities Gibson displays a well structured mentalist show. 

Gibson does not limit himself to mentalism, opting for a classic cup and ball to get the show going, to great success.  A few tipsy audience members who had wandered in apparently entirely aware of what they were getting themselves in for could be heard commenting that Mysteries; An Hour of Impossibilities was already the best show they had seen this year as Gibson set his cup and ball to the side.  The one slight hiccup came in his transition to the more mentalism-themed part of the show, when a supposedly suggestible participant was slightly less suggestible than expected, but Gibson did not miss a beat, and her initial hesitation only made the second step of Gibson’s work with her that much more impressive. 

However the main event is Gibson’s mind reading using personality questionnaires that he had asked the audience to fill in immediately on entering the venue.  The quasi-psychological twist of using personality tests rather than just random bits of information adds interest.  Gibson outlines the personality types of his participants based on their responses, in what he freely admits are horoscope-level generalizations, before accurately mind reading more specific details.  The range of information gleaned and individuals read made for an exciting final segment. 

With a convenient  pre-dinner time slot at the ever popular Voodoo Rooms Gibson is this year’s must-see for the Fringe’s mentalism fans.  An hour in his affable company will only leave audiences wanting more. 

More information on Cameron Gibson can be found here.

IMPOSSIBLE! WITH BRENDON PEEL

☆☆☆

If magic is known for anything other than the tricks, it’s the bad jokes that make audiences groan until they reluctantly laugh. Brendon Peel, in Impossible! With Brendon Peel got the memo loud and clear, with an impressive stream of jokes that are absolutely terrible in the absolute best way. Impossible! Is an intentionally hodgepodge show, as Peel explains at the start that his aim is to give the audience a taste of each of the genres of magic, from sleight of hand to mind reading. The audience gets a glimpse of an apparently sweet and supportive friendship with fellow magician Tomas McCabe, who Peel points out at the back of his audience as the one to see for those who especially enjoy his mentalism section. But for an overview of magic, Peel is the one to see.

A highlight of the tricks on offer is Peel’s card finding trick. At the reviewed show the participant brought up to help with this was a young boy who looked thrilled to have been invited to share the spotlight. Peel is great with the kids in his audience, going out of his way to involve them all in his act—which is not explicitly geared toward children but is family friendly. Peel’s card finding trick was elevated by its callback to the first mind reading trick of the show, adding an unexpected extra reveal.

This first trick incidentally was a longer-form reveal that many magicians use as a grand finale. Its placement at the start of the show is an early indication of Peel’s skill and justified confidence in his act. Like the acrobats who jump straight in to a three-high tower in their opening number, he lets the audience know that they don’t need to wait until the end to be impressed, the entire show is on that higher level.

Impossible! With Brendon Peel is a perfect introduction to magic for all ages, and his excellent showmanship makes it fun for seasoned magic fans as well. His limited Fringe run is already proving popular, with a busy audience for his first weekend. He can only get more popular as word of his abilities spreads.

More information on Brendon Peel can be found here.

LUIS CARREON: LA BESTIA

☆☆☆☆

The Chicago Magic Lounge has a dual identity, and if one comes early to a show, they have the privilege in witnessing both sides. Magicians tend bar while hobbyists and hangers-on chat loudly about their own illusions, their own connections with “big names” in the magic world. Little jokes are made for the purpose of dropping names, and all at a volume intended to let everyone hear but not everyone understand. This bar is not a land for the casual attendee, this is where the diehards reign. That being said, there is a universal appeal here as well- in a venue that one goes through a fake laundromat entrance to access, this is only another sign that you have been accepted into a deliciously secret space, with tantalizing rumors abound.

But let yourself be ushered into the performance space, and your experience develops in a whole different way. Because while the Lounge itself may have two faces, Artist in Residence Luis Carreon is a man utterly secure in his own identity, and eager to invite his audience into experiencing it. This is the identity the Lounge thrives in sharing, the showmanship talent they have done so well cultivating.

Carreon’s pet schtick in his show La Bestia is, to be blunt, his ethnicity. Tricks and jokes alike are formed primarily around his Mexican background. This tactic lends a sense of cohesion to a show where otherwise the stream of tricks would seem picked at random, a collection of standard coin, card and similar familiar effects. However, a well-constructed persona can color a show, but cannot serve as the sole narrative, which Carreon seems to attempt. Carreon delights and charms the audience with ease through his authenticity. A smidge more confidence would seem to be all he needs to free him from overplaying his history and allow him to integrate it into a more developed narrative to build his show around.

Ultimately, Carreon is a talented performer who lacks only a little polish and experience. His comedic timing is clever and refreshing – when he lets it be. Carreon’s audience is captivated by every joke he lets breathe. He need only to stop overfilling his performance with any joke, trick, and pop culture reference he can think of, to stop throwing material at the wall hoping it will stick. The material that the audience gets time and space to absorb does stick, and spectacularly so.

Luis Carreon is a charming performer, and faultlessly adept at sleight of hand. While La Bestia may be at moments bloated with material, one gets the sense that this is because Carreon is so in love with his art that he cannot imagine not sharing his favourite parts of it with his crowd. This openness and delight with communicating the magic of magic wins his audience to him, and deservedly so. La Bestia is an experience well worth attending, and one that will likely only get better each time.  

More information on Carreon and his performance dates can be found here.