In our technology-driven time when we can fabricate A.I. videos of the most fantastic, improbable scenarios on demand, and when news sources are challenged for their veracity, I feel compelled to ask: Do we still have the capacity for the age-old excitement generated by magic?
Illusionist Vitaly [Beckman] hails from Belarus in the former Soviet Union, and now calls Vancouver home—so, you might imagine that his desire to dazzle has some rebellious fomenting from being born in a decidedly unglamorous epoch.
He made a name for himself by coming up victorious thrice on Penn & Teller’s TV show “Fool Us,” and he continues to bewilder people in the tradition of a Copperfield-esque visionary arriving to confound and delight audiences.
He bends reality in ways that are not unlike what software increasingly provides on our screens. But be that as it may, Vitaly’s approach is no tech trick: His is an in-the-flesh reworking of things that we could only previously imagine in pixels. He deals in artistic flair that enlivens still-life paintings, prompting them into action like only the best functions of Adobe Firefly might. He loses people from their IDs in the way Google’s Magic Eraser plucks an unsightly bystander from a selfie. And the magician somehow manages to make movement appear on what is a two-dimensional paper photograph.
In this show, he’s attempting to tell his own biography through illusion. Of course, in a field that requires reinvention to avoid being a nostalgic act or worse—tolerably quaint, Vitaly skirts close to parody of the entire endeavor.
It’s hard not to have flashbacks of Gob Bluth (Will Arnett) and Tony Wonder (Ben Stiller) on “Arrested Development.” But, at any kind of magic show, suspension of belief is mandatory in order to enjoy yourself. Here’s the one thing you must know going into this: You don’t want to be the person posting to your friends that the night vision video of all the bunnies jumping on the trampoline isn’t real, or the cynic in the crowd, arms folded, and constantly muttering about how it’s all a con. Live a little.
