Touhill uses its illusion(ist)

Courtesy of Mike Super

There are certain professions that people take for granted. Whether you call them magicians, illusionists, mentalists, mystifiers or charlatans, those who pursue the professional art and discipline of illusion are often brought up only as the butt of jokes or in whimsical reference. Mike Super, winner of NBC’s 2007 series “Phenomenon,” recalled a memory from elementary school while warming up the Touhill audience for another illusion on Saturday.

“My teacher was asking everybody what they want to be when they grow up, and I said ‘magician,’ to which she replied, ‘Mike, that’s not a real job,’” Super said. If another boy could be an astronaut, the young Super wondered, why couldn’t he be a magician?

It was Super’s mother who assured him that he could be a magician if he wanted to. He ended the show with a poignant tribute to his mother, a moment that capped a night which had deftly moved from thrillingly theatrical to pointedly funny. For the most part, this unexpected infusion of humor into a magic show was effective. However, Super, while personable and charming, wisely knows that his true forte is illusion. And this skill, which led Super to defeat nine other forerunners in the world of mystifying in front of judges Criss Angel and Uri Geller, was on full and incredible display at Super’s Touhill performance.

The current information and image-saturated generation is rarely awed. With bite-sized video clips of every wonder imaginable at its finger tips, this generation is rather numb to the age-old art of magicianry. Yet even the most hardened, seen-it-all skeptic would be amazed at the sights that Super unveiled on stage in the splendid Anheuser-Busch auditorium.

Timeless magic staples were on full display: audience volunteers were made to float, put in impossibly small boxes, and run through with swords. But Super also brought his own flavor to the field. Among his personally created routines was a particularly impressive “voodoo” riff, in which Super made a blindfolded volunteer “feel” what he did to a doll from a distance, even revealing ashy burn marks on their hands after he sets the doll’s hands alight.

It is incredible stuff that simultaneously stimulates our desire to be amazed by miracles and also to figure out the secret behind these illusions. Short of the physical experience of the show, it is hard to communicate the spectacle. Super took great pains to show every angle of every prop. He struck swords on the ground so the audience could hear their steel and see their solid dimensions. He spun around the board the volunteer would levitate on. And while she was floating, he ran his hands under and around the platform she floated on to show that there is nothing propping it up or suspending it from the ceiling. The overall effect was one that disarmed and enchanted.

The set was simple but colorful. Playful and bombastic musical choices added a dramatic but still tongue-in-cheek layer to the performance.

Super himself constantly walked the line of reassuring the audience that illusions were only that, while displaying a passion for pulling off tricks that seemed like they could not possibly be anything but real.

Grade: B