My wife and I are always on the lookout for a bargain vacation, and with a three-day holiday weekend looming before us this month, something really caught Mrs. K.’s eye - Las Vegas. There were rooms going at the Golden Nugget downtown at $29 a night. The price was right, and I’ve always wanted to A. Stay downtown for a change and B. Go to Las Vegas in that slow, dead week just before Christmas. I had heard Harry Shearer say once that the only way you can tell it’s Christmas in Vegas is that the Muzak in the casinos is playing THE NUTCRACKER SUITE. I was sold.

While we were in town we caught three shows: Dirk Arthur Xtreme Magic at the Tropicana, Hypnosis Gone Wild at the Aladdin and Penn and Teller at the Rio. I have to admit that my enjoyment of the first two shows would have been greater if I hadn’t seen them AFTER Penn And Teller. Especially Dirk Arthur, who had the twin burden of hosting an afternoon show and not being Penn and Teller.

We always catch magic shows when we’re in Vegas. Mrs. K. likes them because she is an analytical sort who loves to examine the mechanics of a trick and figure out how she’s being fooled. She would love to explain it to me but usually I refuse to let her. It’s not that I would have my fragile belief in magic crushed; to me how the trick is done is beside the point. What interests me is WHY the trick is done.

About have a dozen times in the course of an afternoon, Dirk Arthur turns one of his lovely assistants into a white tiger. What is he trying to say? Are his helpers like the big cats, beautiful and fearsome? Does he long for a world where women must be kept in cages? It’s important for me to note here that any metaphorical content in Xtreme Magic is incidental. It is that most miserable of Vegas gigs, the afternoon show. The afternoon show must be clean, it must be unambiguous and it must be loud enough to keep the attention of shell-shocked tourists who just got into town. It helps for it to be half-price also.

When most people see a magician in the afternoon show they think, “how does he do that amazing trick?” I think, “that poor miserable bastard, he’s probably just waiting for Lance Burton to die.” Other people watch afternoon shows for the spectacle; my wife and I watch them for the schadenfreude.

Penn and Teller, on the other hand, do brilliant magic but its all to illustrate a point, which is that you shouldn’t trust anyone who tells you they are doing magic. One of the highlights of the show is when they do a mind-reading trick to illustrate why you must never, ever, believe someone who says they can read your mind. Dirk Arthur materializes a locomotive engine on stage and it doesn’t have a tenth of the impact of Penn and Teller making a flag disappear because that trick is ABOUT something. Free speech, if you didn’t catch them on West Wing.

Oh, about Vegas and Christmas. Shearer was wrong. The showgirls at the Rio were wearing Santa hats.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 3:30 pm and is filed under General, Stage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.