Junior Reveen carries on family name and show
Illusionist carries on his father’s magic legacy
Ty Reveen was five years old when he first learned his destiny.
It came directly from his father, at the time becoming a star in Canadian theatre as Reveen the Impossibilist. He told his son that he too would one day wear the rhinestone tuxedo and wow crowds with his hypnotism and high-speed memory demonstrations. At the time, Ty remembers he was helping his dad make posters with a pair of scissors, a fairly menial task but one that made the five-year-old boy feel part of the show. While his dad was the ultimate showman, there was no grandeur or gravitas to his pronouncement. It was just a tender moment between father and son.
“He looked at me and kind of said ‘You know, one day, you will be taking over the show,’ ” says Ty Reveen. “I was five years old when I was told that would happen.”
For people of a certain age, The Great Reveen represents a sort of wholesome and vaguely mystical night of entertainment that has become rare these days. Born in Australia in 1935, Peter Reveen spent five decades touring Canada, including hundreds of performances in Calgary. His earworm jingle “The Man they Call Reveen” became well-known across Canada in giddy commercials to promote theatre shows.
Peter passed away in 2013, a few years after his son Ty inherited the tuxedo and continued his father’s legacy with a show he will bring to the Deerfoot Inn and Casino on Saturday.
The development of Reveen: The Next Generation may have seemed pre-destined for Ty, but it was a long time coming.
Born in Australia in 1959, Ty and his siblings had a blessed if somewhat nomadic childhood, including a few years living in Calgary where he attended Highwood and Huntington Hills elementary schools. Among his first memories were sitting on his grandmother’s lap watching his father perform in Australia before the family relocated to North America. It was the first hint that his father did not have a run-ofthe-mill job.
“It was a packed house and must have been about 1961,” he says. “I remember that show. I was in the front row, sitting on her lap and was kind of bewildered about why my dad was on stage and everybody else was looking at him. It kind of hit me that there was something different about this. It wasn’t just a crowd. They were looking at him. And as time went on — everywhere we went — he started to get highly recognized.”
Ty says his father’s embrace of magic and later hypnotism was partially in response to an unhappy childhood. Hewas abandoned by his mother and raised by a father who drank and was emotionally abusive after returning home from the Second World War. Peter Reveen began performing magic at children’s parties and eventually began reading up on hypnotism — which he would later prefer to call being “placed in the superconscious state.”
Always a tireless worker, consummate
I have never been more nervous than I was auditioning for my father over a three-day period.
showman and brilliant self-marketer, Reveen eventually developed a show that made him the highest-grossing act in Canadian theatre and among the most famous magicians.
“He wanted to please his audiences and get that admiration that he wished he would have felt as a child from his parents,” Ty says. “That’s why he became such a great entertainer.”
Which meant he had high standards, particularly when it came to a son he had pegged as his successor decades earlier. After travelling with his father and working on thousands of shows, Ty eventually left to develop his own career in stage design and special effects, which included creating the elaborate design of ZZ Top’s Afterburner tour in the mid-1980s.
But he returned to the fold and in 2000 asked his father about carrying on the act. He was told he would have to perfect the old man’s show, both the hypnotism — where he would famously take “ordinary people and make them do extraordinary things” — and the displays of high-speed memory. It was a daunting thought, but in 2011 his father finally summoned him to Las Vegas to talk about succession.
“I had to go down and audition for him,” Ty says. “I have never been more nervous than I was auditioning for my father over a three-day period. After I got his thumbs up, he said ‘OK, now it’s time to go in front of a theatre full of magicians.’ “
So he performed to a packed house, including “some of the best magicians in the world.” He nailed the high-speed memory demonstrations and earned a standing ovation from the discerning audience. When it was over, Peter Reveen came up on stage and put his rhinestone tuxedo on his son’s shoulders and proclaimed him his successor.
Less than two years later, Peter Reveen died at the age of 77.
“When I was told at such a young age that I would one day take over the show, I guess when I would watch him I was imagining myself,” Ty says. “So I kind of became him. The son became the father became the Man They Call Reveen. I brought (my mother) up to see the show in Newfoundland last year and she said ‘I kept looking on stage and seeing your father. I had to keep reminding myself that it was you, not your father.’”