June 18, 2018

A Genuine Magician

By roadsrus

 

One of the most popular attractions in Sydney, Australia, is not in most of the travel literature.  The Magician’s Cabaret is at 91 Riley Street in Darlinghurst.  The Magician’s Cabaret has performances only on Friday and Saturday nights.  The Saturday night show, La Fortuna, is in its 5th year and contains dinner, showgirls, magic tricks, and lots of razzmatazz.  Book a long time ahead.  If you can get in like Ruth and I did, Magician James Karp gives Saturday afternoon tours of the cabaret during which he talks about the most common magic tricks.  It’s lots of fun and attracts many young couples and multi-generational families.  Our group of 20 included 7 children.  Book by phone or, even better, on-line at themagicianscabaret.com; and don’t show up until the tour’s scheduled time, 1:30 pm.

After Karp gave his career history and talked about the upcoming show, he took his tour guests backstage, engaged a child to act as his assistant, and began talking about magic.  My favorite of his performance-centered quips was, “Magic happens when you feel, not when you think.”  He talked about the time he regretfully wore a pirate shirt to perform in instead of traditional magician’s attire, often addressed the importance of his assistant, and said that he succeeds when the ears in his audience lie to their owners’ brains.  He told us that a good magician keeps that audience in front and below him.  He said the most dangerous magic trick is “the bullet catch”.  This was no surprise, but a lot of what he did say was.  For example, he showed us a photo of Jerry Lewis and told us that this famous comedian wrote a book about magic during his long lifetime.

 When Karp told us that he had learned magic in the traditional way, I was reminded of one of my favorite high school teachers who was also a professional magician.  When we were very, very good, he’d perform some card tricks, so he had no trouble getting and keeping our attention during classes.   One of my main regrets of this trip is that we ran out of time and had to decline Karp’s invitation to attend an evening show.

Hank

 

About roadsrus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roadsrus
This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2018 at 8:10 pm and posted in New South Wales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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