The Illusionists has many magic touches
For an evening of magic and amusement, The Illusionists — Live From Broadway did the trick.
The show, performed twice Saturday night at Little Rock’s Robinson Center, featured five illusion gurus — Jeff Hobson, “The Trickster”; Kevin James, “The Inventor”; Colin Cloud, “The Deductionist”; An Ha Lim, “The Manipulator”; and Jonathan Goodwin, “The Daredevil” — in stirring form.
Their fast-paced program of alternating performers lasted a mere 90 minutes with no intermission. (Although that was still too long for a small child in earshot: “Is this ever going to end?” said the voice in the darkness about an hour into the night’s early performance.)
Most jaw-dropping was the “mind-reading” of Deductionist Cloud, familiar from appearing in last season’s America’s Got Talent. He opened the show asking an audience member to multiply the random numbers other spectators gave her on her iPhone. The result was 2,318,506 … or 2/3/18 at 5:06 — the exact time of the performance. Whoa! The wonder continued when he correctly guessed everything from audience members’ names to birthdays to hobbies (fencing, really?).
Cheeky Trickster Hobson was comical and captivating. With his over-the-top antics and gift for improv with the crowd, he turned a seemingly simple disappearing egg-in- a-bag trick into something special (where did it go? And when and how did he “steal” the volunteers’ watches?). Same for elevating a humble thread trick he performed while reciting his punny “fabric-ated story.” “Speaking off the cuff,” he says, he did “the vest I could.”
Inventor James (not the Kevin James from TV/movies) was versatile, making a tissue float, then turning it into a paper rose and then — fire poof! — into a real rose for a little girl, sawing an assistant in half and making it “snow.”
Most complex were Daredevil Goodwin’s extreme and successfully executed stunts — dangling from his teeth 20 feet in the air while trying to escape handcuffs and a circular saw, and shooting a crossbow at assistants while blindfolded.
Manipulator An Ha Lim was slick with the sleight of hand, managing to look like he was plucking a whole casino’s worth of cards out of thin air. Though we’d guess they probably were pulled from all his many jacket pockets.