Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
Magic
Goes Wrong
Vaudeville
Theatre
January - March 2020
This comic show starts
strong, sags badly in the middle and recovers somewhat by the end. Stick
it out through the dip and you'll have a satisfying couple of hours of
spoon-fed undemanding entertainment.
Mischief Theatre are the
folks who brought you The Play That Goes Wrong, in which talented
performers pretend to be inept amateurs trying to put on a show and
hitting snags from missed cues to recalcitrant props. Here talented
performers pretend to be inept magicians trying to put on a show and
getting every trick wrong.
And so we have the cheesy
host magician (Henry Shields) who drops his playing cards and can't get
the hidden pigeons out of his sleeves, the mind reader (Henry Lewis) who
guesses wrong every time, and the daredevil (Dave Hearn) who only manages
to maim himself a new way with every trick.
All three, founding members
of Mischief Theatre, are credited with writing this show, along with the
American comedy-magic team Penn & Teller, who specialise in tricks
that seem to go wrong but don't, and at least one sequence here – the
drowning man trick – comes straight from the P&T repertoire.
We're clearly deep into Tommy
Cooper territory here, though without Cooper's cheery distancing from his
own seeming ineptitude. The biggest strength of the show is that all three
performers, as directed by Adam Meggido, are fully committed to their
characters and make us believe in these wannabe magicians even as we laugh
at their failures.
The biggest weakness is that
it is essentially a one-joke show, and the sag in energy I referred to
starts about a half-hour in, as you realise that it is all going to be
just a string of minor variations on the things-going-wrong gag.
The three characters take
centre stage a few times each, but there are no surprises – you know
before it happens that the daredevil is going to hurt himself, the mind
reader is going to fail and the pigeons are doomed. The same
predictability extends to everything around them – the showgirls will be
klutzes, the planted-in-the-audience stooge obvious, the special effects
mistimed.
It is only toward the end,
when a couple of tricks actually go right and – more importantly – when we
begin to appreciate the skill and talent it takes to look so inept and to
carry it through with a straight face, that the show regains our
attention.
Come to laugh at the ineptitude, make it through the dip in the middle, and end up admiring and enjoying the talent it takes to look so bad.
Gerald Berkowitz
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