5th Avenue Theatre was packed last night with a rowdy, boisterous, mind-blown crowd. “Wow!” and “What?” and “Oh my god” all night long. Plenty of jokes that kept on giving, jokes that went right over the kids’ heads. Plenty of tricks involving people from the audience who didn’t know each other having their minds read. One of the guys whose mind got read (he was picked at random—it seemed legit) was outside the theater afterward saying to a crowd of people gathered around him, “No idea. No clue. I did everything I could to mess it up.”
The guy doing the mind-reading was the delightfully named Colin Cloud. He did enough things that shocked me, and the shocks were so pleasurable, that I don’t want to sum them up here, for fear of spoiling anything. But let me just say: I have been to a lot of magic shows before, I collected magic tricks as a kid and put on my own magic shows, and I have no idea how he did the things he did. My date to the show was an engineer—someone who loves to talk about physics and measurable phenomena—and he couldn’t figure out how Cloud did what he did, either.
Cloud, on the left in the picture above, is known as The Deductionist. (He’s a “psychic savant known as a real-life Sherlock Holmes” and “one of the greatest thought readers of all time,” according to press materials.) Next to him, in the white jacket, is The Inventor (Kevin James). In the center is The Trickster (Jeff Hobson), who brings down the house with his showmanship and simpering wit. To the right of him is The Daredevil (Jonathan Goodwin), who performs stunts involving straightjackets, cinderblocks, circular saws, sledgehammers, and more. And to the far right is The Manipulator (An Ha Lim), who is a stunning sleight-of-hand performer. He makes cards appear in his fingertips like cherry blossoms, and they fly from his hands in dizzying volume. It’s absolutely beautiful and astounding.
It doesn’t matter where in the audience you’re sitting, because a gigantic screen onstage shows a live feed from a cameraman who gets up close to each trick. At one point, The Inventor walked down the aisle and picked a 7-year-old girl from the crowd. As they stood there in the aisle, The Inventor crumpled up a Kleenex and made it move with his mind. Then he taught her how to make it move with her mind. Then he turned the Kleenex into a flower shape. Then he made the Kleenex flower suspend in midair. I was a few feet away. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Then he set fire to the Kleenex (for a second, I thought it was going to catch the girl’s hair on fire), and when the fire had cleared it had become a real flower. The girl walked back to her family with the flower, almost unimpressed, which was hilarious in its own way. Seattle’s youth! The rest of the crowd was gobsmacked.
It’s a hell of a show, and it’s only in town for two more nights. If you’re looking for something to do this weekend, you can’t go wrong. Bring kids, grandparents, skeptics—anyone. And if you figure out any of Colin Cloud’s tricks, please tell me how he does it.
The Illusionists runs at 5th Avenue Theatre through March 18.
