Houdini

If the Muppets are deployed as window dressing, the illusions themselves are a museum of inherited gestures. Lake presents the familiar canon of contemporary stage magic: the bifurcated assistant, the levitating woman afloat above a bed of water (which, in its defense, has the best stage accoutrements of the evening), the interlocking wedding rings that actually make it back to their owners, the transmogrified paper rose born of a Kleenex, the sealed-box prediction trick. These are the old reliables, charming chestnuts of the craft. And to be fair, if it is your first encounter with such wonders in the flesh, they retain an undeniable potency. Something impossible happens before your eyes, and for a moment one senses the naïve astonishment that once greeted Houdini or Blackstone. But the long shadow of 20th-century spectacle looms large. When David Copperfield made a woman vanish, he seemed to risk something existential—his illusions were staged with the gravitas of a metaphysical wager. Doug Henning, all fringe and mystical glow, imbued the form with a countercultural buoyancy. Lake’s versions, by comparison, feel perfunctory, the delivery mechanical rather than miraculous. To deploy the same tricks as one’s predecessors is no sin, but to do so without reimagining them—or without doing them better—is a kind of aesthetic resignation. [more]