It’s a great feeling when attending a magic or mentalism show to turn around and see all of the seats filled. Not with pensioners, children and notebook-wielding magicians as one would typically expect but with a savvy, theatre-going audience. For Gary Kurtz’s English language premier of his show “Just An Illusion?” he sold out all 1450 seats of Montreal’s Theatre Maisonneuve. Kurtz has been performing his show in French for the past four years but this was his first attempt to crack the Anglophone market.

As the audience filtered in to the theatre a few people were offered a ‘free upgrade’ which meant seats on the stage. The seating formed part of the larger set. On the stage itself stood a large bookcase and a lectern and a globe and huge eye hung down from the ceiling. All plenty to arouse curiosity before the show started.

Kurtz’s influence on the magic community is still very much evident. If you watch a close-up competition it is very likely you will see one of the acts do a Flurious style routine and with the reissue of his old videos on DVD, he looks set within our world to remain frozen in time in the early Nineties as the guy with the tall hair and amazingly visual coin magic. In 2007 the coin tricks are gone (and the hair too – more of a crew cut now) but fortunately the charismatic and poetic presentational style that he was equally as well known for is still very much in evidence.

The audience’s attention was held for two hours with largely classic effects with novel twists and excellent routining. A tossed out deck routine opened the show where eight people were used and finishing with someone being given the cards to keep, a great book test sequence, a very tense Russian roulette with four lethal looking knives and a confabulation style trick which had been designed to play much bigger all formed part of the show. To dwell on the tricks seems fairly redundant when the focus of the show was Kurtz and his abilities. A few theatrical monologues that peppered the performance apparently gave an insight into how we was able to achieve what he did. He told how as a child he took a ride on a merry-go-round but fell off, then repeatedly hit his head on the wooden horses as he tried to stand up! Believable? Not really – but good fun and thankfully light years apart from the pseudo explanations that the current wave of mini-Derrens would choose to offer.

Kurtz is planning more English language shows in the future so make sure you don’t miss out if he comes anywhere near you!

February 2007, Theatre Maisonneuve, Montreal, Quebec