Stage illusions were a popular art they worked at pace, with drive and rolling drums. And his plot - garish, crude, infernally clever - is precisely honed to the task: it is a triumph of misdirection, a nest of boxes constantly springing fresh surprises. Cue much mayhem and hectic adventuring.īut Gold's real aim is to recapture the lost era of the great illusionists and escapologists, of Houdini, Thurston and Devant, to evoke the time when audiences believed what they saw a time when real magic was somehow possible and its prime purveyors were among the most famous people on earth. Two hours before some mysterious illness carries him off, Harding appears on stage with Charlie Carter the Great, master magician, and confides an awful secret to him. We begin and end in San Francisco, 1923, with the sudden death of Warren Gamaliel Harding (a US president to make George W Bush look imposing).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |