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LJ Idol 9.30: Critical hit...
Dec. 7th, 2014 09:35 pmThe opportunity to perform on Broadway doesn't come along too often in one's life, so when my friend and mentor Jay called to offer me a gig performing on stage at the American Theater of Magic, located at the corner of Broadway and 48th Street in New York, I jumped at the chance.
At the time, The Magic Show was one of the hottest tickets on the Great White Way, and its star, Doug Henning, had been nominated for a Tony as best actor in a musical, so I was well and truly excited at this opportunity. But my excitement was tempered with skepticism, because my forte—the type of magic that led people to say I was an "up and coming" magician—was performing at a table, sitting close to people, using a bare minimum of gimmicks, and not up on a stage with gaudy props and an audience seated some distance away.
As it turned out, the "theater" was a fairly large room, about 50 feet on a side with a high ceiling, situated at the end of a crooked corridor that one entered from the bottom of a long staircase that led from the Broadway entrance at street level. There was an emergency exit on the other side of the room, a "dressing room" for the performers (actually, a table and some chairs behind a curtained partition behind the audience seating), seats for about 30 or 40 people, and a smallish stage with a curtained proscenium.
During my first visit, Jay introduced me around, to the boss and the other performers; there was no stage crew. The boss was a middle-aged Jewish fellow named Sol, who reminded me of Zero Mostel playing the role of Max Bialystock in The Producers. He also had the annoying habit of referring to himself in the third person, as "Little Sol," which I was told was intended to distinguish him from the then late Sol Hurok, the great impresario, whose position in the show business world was something "Little Sol" intended to inherit. My fellow performers included a woman sword swallower, a Russian émigré clown, and a gent who had worked various sideshows over the years as a "wild man."
Jay and I spent a couple of weeks scripting and rehearsing my act until Jay and "Little Sol" felt I was ready to replace Jay on the bill, at which point he became the show's emcee for a week or two before moving on to greener pastures.
The show opened with a routine by Oleg, a clown who had been trained at the Moscow Circus School, the world's first government-run educational institution for circus performers. His act consisted of various tricks with hats, done in pantomime. He tossed them, spun them, rolled them, juggled them, and they invariably ended up sitting squarely on his head. It was actually a pretty cool act.
Oleg and his family had somehow managed to emigrate from the USSR and come to the United States, but upon arriving, Oleg found it difficult to find gainful employment given his limited language and work skills, and his weekend work at the theater was apparently one of several part-time jobs he held down to make ends meet. He helped me with my Russian conversation skills, while I helped him draft letters that he sent to various places inquiring about work in his chosen profession.
Lady Estelline, the sword swallower, followed Oleg. I still have a publicity still of hers, somewhere, taken when she was a young woman, long before I met her for the first time at the table in the "dressing room" as she squinted through a pair of glasses to sign a Social Security check. I recall how, after a few weeks, I worked up the nerve to overcome my natural shyness and ask what had led her to embark on her rather unusual career, to which she really didn't provide a good answer. "Why does anyone do anything?" she'd reply. I regret not simply then asking her, "Was it because you wanted to run away and join the circus?" Her swords may have been blunt with dull edges, but she still handled them expertly.
Mine was the third act, and any nervousness I may have had about performing magic on stage (instead of on a table top) disappeared during my first show. I performed magic with handkerchiefs, steel rings, ropes, and even a bird (on loan from Jay), and the high point of the act was a levitation effect that never ceased to please the audience, or the boss, who could always be counted on to stop by after I had come off stage to let me know, in a sort of sing-song, that I had done a great job and "Little Sol has his eye on you!"
After me came the "wild man," whose name was George, a close-mouthed individual who sat apart and read The New York Times with the aid of a magnifying glass between shows. Back in his youth, he had worked in various circus sideshows as a "geek" (so named after the noise an audience would make when, in the course of his act, he would bite the head off a live chicken or snake), but now, clearly in his declining years, despite the fact that a fierce fire still burned in his eyes, George's act consisted of arranging himself on stage to resemble some kind of mystical kneeling figure who waved rag dolls at the audience for a while, whereupon he would light two or three cigarettes, smoke them down a bit, and then—swallow them! After making suitably mysterious noises and gestures, and exhaling streams of smoke through his nostrils, George would end his act by regurgitating the cigarettes—still lit! Audience members who hadn't cleared the room before George finished his act generally went away pretty impressed.
In the end, the bill at the American Theater of Magic turned out to be neither a popular nor a critical hit (in retrospect, I don't believe any critic with a shred of self-respect would have been caught dead in our little auditorium). After a few weeks, audiences dwindled. If there was to be a future for sideshow acts, this was not the place for it. Any revival would have to wait for performers who were neither greatly past their prime (as in the case of Estelline and George), desperate to find something better (like Oleg), or simply naïve and inexperienced (like me).
By the end of the summer, the Theater had closed its doors, leaving me with the experience of having performed on—well, okay… under—Broadway.
Looking back, I like to think Jay did me a great favor in booking me for this gig. In doing so, he exposed me first hand to the kind of hard-knock endings not typically found in storybooks, but which happen all too often in real life.
At the time, The Magic Show was one of the hottest tickets on the Great White Way, and its star, Doug Henning, had been nominated for a Tony as best actor in a musical, so I was well and truly excited at this opportunity. But my excitement was tempered with skepticism, because my forte—the type of magic that led people to say I was an "up and coming" magician—was performing at a table, sitting close to people, using a bare minimum of gimmicks, and not up on a stage with gaudy props and an audience seated some distance away.
As it turned out, the "theater" was a fairly large room, about 50 feet on a side with a high ceiling, situated at the end of a crooked corridor that one entered from the bottom of a long staircase that led from the Broadway entrance at street level. There was an emergency exit on the other side of the room, a "dressing room" for the performers (actually, a table and some chairs behind a curtained partition behind the audience seating), seats for about 30 or 40 people, and a smallish stage with a curtained proscenium.
During my first visit, Jay introduced me around, to the boss and the other performers; there was no stage crew. The boss was a middle-aged Jewish fellow named Sol, who reminded me of Zero Mostel playing the role of Max Bialystock in The Producers. He also had the annoying habit of referring to himself in the third person, as "Little Sol," which I was told was intended to distinguish him from the then late Sol Hurok, the great impresario, whose position in the show business world was something "Little Sol" intended to inherit. My fellow performers included a woman sword swallower, a Russian émigré clown, and a gent who had worked various sideshows over the years as a "wild man."
Jay and I spent a couple of weeks scripting and rehearsing my act until Jay and "Little Sol" felt I was ready to replace Jay on the bill, at which point he became the show's emcee for a week or two before moving on to greener pastures.
The show opened with a routine by Oleg, a clown who had been trained at the Moscow Circus School, the world's first government-run educational institution for circus performers. His act consisted of various tricks with hats, done in pantomime. He tossed them, spun them, rolled them, juggled them, and they invariably ended up sitting squarely on his head. It was actually a pretty cool act.
Oleg and his family had somehow managed to emigrate from the USSR and come to the United States, but upon arriving, Oleg found it difficult to find gainful employment given his limited language and work skills, and his weekend work at the theater was apparently one of several part-time jobs he held down to make ends meet. He helped me with my Russian conversation skills, while I helped him draft letters that he sent to various places inquiring about work in his chosen profession.
Lady Estelline, the sword swallower, followed Oleg. I still have a publicity still of hers, somewhere, taken when she was a young woman, long before I met her for the first time at the table in the "dressing room" as she squinted through a pair of glasses to sign a Social Security check. I recall how, after a few weeks, I worked up the nerve to overcome my natural shyness and ask what had led her to embark on her rather unusual career, to which she really didn't provide a good answer. "Why does anyone do anything?" she'd reply. I regret not simply then asking her, "Was it because you wanted to run away and join the circus?" Her swords may have been blunt with dull edges, but she still handled them expertly.
Mine was the third act, and any nervousness I may have had about performing magic on stage (instead of on a table top) disappeared during my first show. I performed magic with handkerchiefs, steel rings, ropes, and even a bird (on loan from Jay), and the high point of the act was a levitation effect that never ceased to please the audience, or the boss, who could always be counted on to stop by after I had come off stage to let me know, in a sort of sing-song, that I had done a great job and "Little Sol has his eye on you!"
After me came the "wild man," whose name was George, a close-mouthed individual who sat apart and read The New York Times with the aid of a magnifying glass between shows. Back in his youth, he had worked in various circus sideshows as a "geek" (so named after the noise an audience would make when, in the course of his act, he would bite the head off a live chicken or snake), but now, clearly in his declining years, despite the fact that a fierce fire still burned in his eyes, George's act consisted of arranging himself on stage to resemble some kind of mystical kneeling figure who waved rag dolls at the audience for a while, whereupon he would light two or three cigarettes, smoke them down a bit, and then—swallow them! After making suitably mysterious noises and gestures, and exhaling streams of smoke through his nostrils, George would end his act by regurgitating the cigarettes—still lit! Audience members who hadn't cleared the room before George finished his act generally went away pretty impressed.
In the end, the bill at the American Theater of Magic turned out to be neither a popular nor a critical hit (in retrospect, I don't believe any critic with a shred of self-respect would have been caught dead in our little auditorium). After a few weeks, audiences dwindled. If there was to be a future for sideshow acts, this was not the place for it. Any revival would have to wait for performers who were neither greatly past their prime (as in the case of Estelline and George), desperate to find something better (like Oleg), or simply naïve and inexperienced (like me).
By the end of the summer, the Theater had closed its doors, leaving me with the experience of having performed on—well, okay… under—Broadway.
Looking back, I like to think Jay did me a great favor in booking me for this gig. In doing so, he exposed me first hand to the kind of hard-knock endings not typically found in storybooks, but which happen all too often in real life.
