Word: illusionist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Great Herrmann, not Kellar, not Thurston, not Houdini was able to make a good thing of a magic show on Broadway, and for the past 13 years Broadway has seen no full-size illusionist's performance. Undaunted, a miraculous hoodwinker who looks a little like Satan on stage and a little like Buffalo Bill off, who used to call himself The Great Jansen and who now bills himself as Dante, sailed into the Times Square district last week and set up Sim Sola Bim, a "mystery spectacle." Widely advertised as meaning "thanks to you" in Danish, Sim Sala...
...strict classifications of his strict and jealous calling Mystifier Dante is both a prestidigitator (he does sleight of hand) and an illusionist (he does tricks which require elaborate props to help the illusion). Pacing his illusions to the brassy blare of carnival music, Mystifier Dante whirled through an inferno of prestidigitatorial feats, transformed a tailor's dummy into a lady, made stooges vanish right & left. Loudly acclaimed was his trick of covering the open ends of a small beer barrel with paper, then distributing a few noggins from the keg among the audience. With dancing chairs, eerie levitation, mysterious...
What is powerful in Here Come the Clowns is not its tricky story nor its Sunday-school philosophy but its ominous, troubled atmosphere. The hypnotic "illusionist," with his Mephistophelean sense of evil; the hysterical emotions of the dazed people he operates upon; the submerged, intolerable griefs that he forces them to stammer out-these have the kind of horror found in Thomas Mann's famed story Mario and the Magician. Melodramatic, a little shrill, a little unearthly, Here Come the Clowns is like a grotesque tune played on a broken fiddle...
...Scotland Yard men mar the course of detecting by young Bobby and his girl Frankie. Romance survives near-murder, drug ring, kidnappers, a motor "accident." Too soon comes a nicely individual ending. THE THREE COFFINS-John Dickson Carr-Harper ($2). Dr. Fell almost makes an error while pursuing an illusionist. There is a new method of murder in a locked room, a bit of dry humor in the plot. MURDER AT HIGH NOON-Paul McGuire-Crime Club ($2). Murder of a newshawk brings out "the perfect crime"; a final confession clears the last red herring...
BOSTON THEATRE. - Herrmann, the Prestidigitateur and Illusionist...