![]() Penguin Random House, 256 pp., $27 hardcover.ĭelGaudio, who was tormented by doctrinaire bullies in his youth, can sound doctrinaire himself. ![]() “If someone is expecting candy entertainment, my show’s going to be lost on them,” he says, comparing what he does to fine dining. When people come to see him, they should not think about tricks. To deal with audiences who want to see tricks in magic the way audiences want to see stories in theatre, DelGaudio swerves. Magic, in other words, is theatre without plays.) Nor are there dedicated critics of the form to keep practitioners in line. If you want to learn how to do sleight of hand, escape acts, or close up you have to find a teacher or, more recently, the internet. (Here it is impossible not to compare the so-called field of magic with that of theatre. This is, of course, another kind of trick.īy positioning himself as a reluctant magician, DelGaudio appeals to the American appetite for confession, even as he plays the role of a kindly magic Virgil for a public that seems both exhausted by being deceived IRL and yet somehow, still hungry to be so…in the theatre. Onstage, his youthful physicality makes him look like the opposite of someone who could trick you his demeanor is deadpan, as if he has no idea why he’s there. But he also wants to communicate his discomfort with the role. ![]() He wants to be honest about having to deceive the audience, the magician’s job. Whatever you label it-bullshit, magic, mystification-to me the core of what’s interesting about DelGaudio is the way he updates tropes of illusion to appeal to today’s audiences. He is not one of them! I bring up Harry Houdini, who also toggled between reality and fakery and similarly eschewed the word magician, preferring instead to call himself a “mystifier.“ DelGaudio, 36, has another term for Houdini: “a bullshit artist.” When I mention to him how many magicians have flourished on Zoom during the pandemic, he recoils. He has even corrected journalists who use the word “patter” to describe his dialogue.Įarly on, he did not want his tricks to be filmed. In 2018, when his one-man show In & Of Itself (now a Hulu special ) began to buzz, he started calling it a “theatrical existential crisis,” as opposed to a mere magic show. Even before he became famous, Derek DelGaudio was insistent about differentiating what he does from the sort of magic he calls “service entertainment”-i.e., guys in top hats doing card tricks for kids at birthday parties or goth magicians in Vegas or on TV.
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