Word: illusionistic
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From its earliest preview last December, this musical with magic found itself riddled with afflictions. Doug Henning, 35, may be America's premier illusionist, number his impish persona in eight TV specials and the longrunning 1974 extravaganza The Magic Show. But there are three things he cannot do onstage: sing, dance and act. To compensate, he cannily plays history's greatest wizard and surrounds himself with kinetic performers...
...Chirico belonged to the company of the great convalescents: Cavafy, Leopardi, Proust. The city was his sanatorium and, as a fabricator of images that spoke of frustration, tension and ritualized memory, he had no equal. No wonder the surrealists adored his early work and adopted its strategies wholesale. The "illusionist" painters among them, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy and Magritte, all came out of early De Chirico, a lineage astutely discussed by Laura Rosenstock in the catalogue; and as another contributor, Wieland Schmied, points out, German painters in the '20s like George Grosz used Chirican motifs to express their vision...
Roth's stab at seriousness is less brilliant. As he dies, Zuckerman's father looks at his son and whispers, "Bastard." Is this the final misunderstanding, the last, most painful blurring of illusion and illusionist? The question is mooted by Zuckerman's response. He is relieved. With his father dead and his old Newark neighborhood unrecognizable, the author of Carnovsky is literally unbound...
Between what is almost certainly true about Madame H.P. (for Helena Petrovna) Blavatsky and what is almost certainly false, there is a perilous region of mists and myths. The dominant truth about H.P.B. was that she founded and was chief illusionist for the Theosophical Society, a spiritualist sect that influenced the poetry of William Butler Yeats and the thinking of Jawaharlal Nehru, and helped to revive the consciousness of India...
...Magic," said Harry Blackstone, the great magician, is "nothing but pure psychology - applied in the right place." That is probably as succinct a definition of the illusionist's art as anyone will ever come up with. What Blackstone discovered was not that audiences can be fooled. It was rather that they long to be fooled and are willing accomplices along...