Uptown Underground Presents REAL MAGIC: FEATURING DANNY DUBIN Review

Then the penny drops, and the audience’s jaws with it.

Combining nimble sleight-of-hand and old-school patter, Dubin takes the room on a wild ride replete with gasps, cheers, and laughter. Classics in the ‘is this your card?’ vein charm, while new and unfamiliar acts dazzle. A high point of the evening is the first act finale.

Dubin invites a member of the audience onstage and asks her to think of a dream, whether a lifelong ambition or a fleeting reverie. She writes it down, folds the paper up tight, and tears it to pieces in plain view of the room. Clearly the magician has had no opportunity to see what she wrote.

Yet the tension builds as he picks up a marker and notepad and performs a few flourishes of mentalism. And when he flips the paper around to reveal that very dream in big bold letters—Live In Japan!—the audience is astounded and delighted—none more so than the dreamer herself.

Food for the Head and Heart

A couple hours of impressive illusions would be plenty satisfying on its own, but Real Magic offers more than that. By inviting the audience to participate and by sharing his own personal stories, Dubin takes the show beyond wonder (and wonderful it is!) to recollection, introspection, and emotion.

After the astonishment of the dream reveal, Dubin asks everyone to come up to the stage during intermission, write down the name of their first kiss and the year said kiss occurred, and drop the paper into a small box. As the second act begins, an audience volunteer comes up, picks a single slip to read, and of course does not reveal its contents. Instead, Dubin, marker and pad once again in hand, sifts through decades and years, letters and names, and eventually divines the answer: Lauren, 1995.

In this segment it is not so much the final revelation but the build-up that captures the audience’s imaginations. One person has their first kiss correctly predicted on stage. A roomful of people, though, are transported back to their own special moment, be it days or decades ago, a moment of intimate significance. This may not be a trick, but it is a kind of magic all its own.

It is a similar feeling when, for perhaps the simplest act of the evening, the magician reaches into his pockets and pulls out a skein of string, a pair of scissors, and a yarmulke (the traditional head covering of Jewish men). Cutting off a length of string and donning the skullcap, he explains that though he wears it in day-to-day life as an expression of faith, he takes it off during performances to avoid preconceived notions that might raise barriers between entertainer and audience.

As he snips the string into smaller pieces, Dubin speaks plainly and clearly about the walls we all build, the bridges we all need, and the ways we can work together to heal some of the wounds in this world. There is no flash, no razzle-dazzle. Nonetheless, when he bunches all the loose ends into a tight little ball, then pulls it apart to show the original length of string reformed, a thrill goes through the room, not just of enjoyment at an illusion done well, but something more.

About the Author:

Harold Jaffe is a poet, playwright, amateur trapeze artist, freelance greeting card designer, and now, unexpectedly, a theater critic. He earned a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Olin College and since returning to Chicago has worked extensively with Cave Painting Theater Company and the late great Oracle Productions. His chapbook Perpetual Emotion Machine is now available at Women & Children First, and his reviews of shows around town are available right here.