Penn & Teller review – icons of stage magic celebrate 50 years in canny new Australian show
The uncomfortable bedfellows of religion and physics feature heavily in the latest show from Penn & Teller, the mavericks of stage magic, now celebrating 50 year of working together.
Penn (hefty, loquacious and now 69) and Teller (gnomic, silent and 76) made their stage debut in 1975 in a renaissance fair in Shakopee, Minnesota, as the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society. Such were the times.
In the decades since, they have become icons of stage magic and a particular brand of comedy, working as self-professed bad boys working in gleeful contrast to the glitzy showmanship and megabucks spectacles of contemporaries David Copperfield, Criss Angel and Siegfried & Roy (whose story, coincidentally, is being in a musical told at Sydney festival; Penn & Teller were spotted among the opening night crowd).
Penn & Teller have played the Sydney Opera House before, in 2022, but appear delighted to be back, at the top of an east coast tour with dates in Melbourne and Brisbane.
Beginning with a neat trick invoking the “crowd wisdom” theory of statistician Francis Galton (Penn & Teller always credit their sources) and a big jar of jellybeans (Penn calls it a carafe), this show is light on spectacle (you’ll find no double bullet catch here) and big on talk and the deft befuddlement of its audience. Penn is a commanding orator – equal parts carny barker, snake oil salesman and evangelist – and he talks more or less constantly for the better part of two hours. It’s a practised patter but still feels off-the-cuff, and it’s as central to the act as the magic tricks.
And “tricks”, the sardonic Penn insists, is exactly what they are. This isn’t stage illusion or special effects (which depends on machinery, smoke and mirrors); Penn & Teller practise the pure art of perplexity.
Not that there aren’t “wow” moments. The guy next to me all but leapt from his seat early in the evening in a routine that begins with Penn opening up an outsized envelope containing the instructions to a newly purchased trick from a magician in Spain. Tonight, Penn tells us, will be their first attempt to perform it in public. His grasp on the Spanish language proves imperfect, however, leading to the appearance of a bowl of soup and – from behind an unfeasibly small red cloth – a gorilla on an armchair.
Mostly, though, the emphasis is on audience participation, which Penn marshals with aplomb. There’s a trick involving hundreds of slips of paper on which we’ve written down an unlikely dream (“you can go as nutty as you want”). There is a deliberately hokey dice box demonstration (with audience heckles helpfully provided) and a comic “mind-reading” session with a robot ape.
Then there is a trick with a particularly lengthy set-up that involves the sceptics in the audience – the “pains-in-the-ass” who think that all volunteers are stooges – who are called to the stage to take part in the next trick themselves. (The show can feel a little defensive in this way, with Penn often reminding us of what’s just happened so we can’t poke holes in it; the duo have had their fair share of doubters, after all.)
But the old-school magic is thoroughly charming. I enjoyed the comic flutters of confetti, sparkly top hats, hidden cupcakes and surprising balloon bursts. At one point Teller even sports a curly magician moustache.
As a duo, they are sharply coordinated but they stress they can’t do it alone. They have a magic team with them: wranglers who help audience members up on to the stage, people cleaning up with big brooms or suddenly appearing in an absurd costume, not to mention lights and sound. The newest member of the team has been with them for 18 years, we’re told. “We’re not a two-person show,” Penn says. “Thanks to everyone.”
The finale sequence is a delight, though it’s actually a canny bit of stagecraft and video work than a trick per se. If it’s glittering spectacle you’re after, maybe look elsewhere. But if you like the idea of being outsmarted while not being made to feel entirely stupid, Penn & Teller is the ticket.
Penn & Teller play the Sydney Opera House until 18 January, the Melbourne Arts Centre 21 to 26 January and the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, from 29 January to 7 February
