Magical Mayhe
person — recognised as a magician by an usher who’d seen him at “a local magic hangout,” as DelGaudio put it — filming the show’s ending, and asked him to delete the footage.
DelGaudio, 33, is fiercely protective of his original material. But he said that he was also alarmed by what he saw as attempts to bottle “the capital-M magic” of a show intended to be an in-person-only experience.
“I’m kind of living my childhood fantasy of creating a Willy Wonka factory,” he said. “And now we have real-life Slugworths tying to steal our gobstoppers.” iPhones, including the 6 Plus, don’t have an infrared transmitter.)
Meade did say that he uses LED flash alerts, which are designed to be highly noticeable. But DelGaudio said that he saw no pulse from the stage, and neither did two theatre employees who observed Meade.
In a small theatre, during a part of the show when the audience is in “complete blackout,” any ordinary light “would’ve been visible from a mile away,” said Jake Friedman, DelGaudio’s manager and one of the show’s co-producers.
DelGaudio may be an outlier among high-profile magicians in his extreme reluctance to put his work on-screen. Scour YouTube and you’ll find only a few 10-year-old clips of him doing card tricks on Spanish television.
Whateverthetruthaboutwhathappened the night Meade visited DelGaudio’s show, word that other magicians may have surreptitiously filmed him drew a strong response from some fellow performers.
“So shameful,” British mentalist Derren Brown, whose show recently ended an off-Broadway run, said on Twitter, after DelGaudio tweeted about the incident, without mentioning any names.
Johnny Thompson, a Las Vegas-based magician and consultant who’s worked with Siegfried & Roy, Criss Angel, Penn & Teller and others, had been unaware of the incident until contacted by a reporter, but said DelGaudio was right to be vigilant.
“There is rampant stealing, in my estimation, in our industry right now,” Thompson said. “Those of us who fight it, those of us who have ethics, we try hard to protect each other.”
The joint ethics statement of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and the Society of American Magicians forbids both “willful exposure” of magic methods and “unauthorised use of another’s creation.”
Originality in magic is a slippery concept. But Teller, the less talkative half of Penn & Teller, said that people, including “uncreative magicians”, have no idea how difficult it is to create substantially new tricks and illusions, like one in Penn & Teller’s current show involving a live cow, which he said took six years to develop.
“If you want to write a piece for the piano, you can write a piece for the piano,” Teller said. “But with magic, you basically have to invent the magical equivalent of a piano, then figure out how to build it, then how to play it, then how to play it in front of an audience.”
Magicians certainly admit to trying to suss out one another’s methods. Teller said that when he went back a second time to see DelGaudio’s show during its initial run last year, in Los Angeles, he was “watching for every little possibility”.
“I saw one major thing I’d missed the first time,” he said. “I thought, ‘Damn, he’s good!’” Still, he said, “there are several things where I don’t know how he’s doing it.”
Meade offered similar praise for DelGaudio’s show, calling the ending “the best thing I’ve ever seen in a live stage show in my entire career,” before extending an invitation: “I hope Derek will come see my show some day so he can be assured it’s nothing like his.”