Penn & Teller on Broadway

I've admired magicians Penn and Teller for a number of years, from their appearances on talk shows, their own TV shows, and movies they produced, so I had always wanted to see them in their natural environment, at the theater named after them in Las Vegas. A few months ago I noticed they'd be doing a limited run on Broadway, and figured, "That's a much shorter distance to travel and will be unique from the Vegas show." As of August 16, P&T have left the Marquis Theater, so this review is written for posterity rather than a recommendation for something you can seek out.

Penn Jillette (the one who does all the speaking) explained that this show became a de facto celebration of the duo having performed together for 40 years, starting in August of 1975. Penn saw Teller performing a needle-and-thread-swallowing trick (which he performed for the Broadway audience of course) and immediately decided he had to work with this silent sleight-of-hand master. Penn and Teller share a disdain for those who profit from lying and fooling the vulnerable, and when performing magic the pair will always remind the audience that almost nothing they see is as it seems. I had seen a few of the tricks during their many television appearances, but seeing the illusions live in a theater is comparable to the difference between listening to an MP3 and going to a concert. Even when I know what they're about to do, hell if I know how they do it.

At the risk of giving away the game, I'd like to give a specific example. Liz and I arrived late to the show (due to poor planning on my part). As we were seated, Penn and Teller were in the middle of a trick where they make an audience member's phone appear inside a dead fish, within a box, in the back of the auditorium. I had just seen this trick on their CW show Penn & Teller: Fool Us, so I told Liz we could watch that part on Hulu to see the part of the routine we missed. Now, I had been certain that Teller was palming the phone and then pulling it out when he cut open the fish, but when we watched closely on the TV show, the plastic in which the phone was contained can be seen peeking out from the fish guts, so... there must be some other method used. These guys keep one guessing.

My favorite routine involved a man being chosen from his seat to use a camcorder on stage, the feed from which was shown on a large overhead screen. This was allegedly to demonstrate why Penn and Teller choose not to use displays throughout their act, saying they distract from what is actually happening on stage. Indeed, they made the trick occur very differently on the screen from what was seen on stage, and I'm pretty sure this could not have been replicated on a TV show. And even though Teller warned us (via written signs) that the trick we thought they were doing was not what they were really doing, the outcome was incredibly surprising.

Penn & Teller do the classic magic tricks like pulling a rabbit out a hat and sawing a woman in half, but with their patented style. They also have tricks involving items as diverse as a metal detector, joke books, and a length of polyester fabric, that I've never seen any other illusionist do. Their sense of humor and skepticism is unmatched in their field, and here's hoping they keep it up for decades to come.