Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

Call it magic, or not, but Penn & Teller are fired up in return to New York

Penn & Teller on Broadway

Joan Marcus

Penn Jillette and Teller perform in “Penn & Teller on Broadway,” a six-week engagement playing at Marquis Theater in New York through Aug. 16, 2015.

Penn & Teller on Broadway

Penn Jillette, right, and Teller perform in Launch slideshow »
Click to enlarge photo

Teller performs in "Penn & Teller on Broadway," a six-week engagement playing at Marquis Theater in New York through Aug. 16, 2015.

Click to enlarge photo

Penn Jillette, right, and Teller perform in "Penn & Teller on Broadway," a six-week engagement playing at Marquis Theater in New York through Aug. 16, 2015.

Click to enlarge photo

Penn Jillette and Teller perform in "Penn & Teller on Broadway," a six-week engagement playing at Marquis Theater in New York through Aug. 16, 2015.

NEW YORK — They never use the word, the one that made them famous, acclaimed and, of course, wealthy over the course of four decades.

No, Penn & Teller never blare or bray “magic” when advertising their act. They never have. The magic is inherent. You see it, feel it. As they prefer to define the experience, you are “fooled” by their performance.

As a result, the nightly objective for Penn & Teller is to generate a mix of feelings. Through a blend of spectacle and silence, they concurrently hope to amaze and deceive but understand that the audience yearns to figure out what’s up their sleeves, all the time.

“We have been conscious of this from the very beginning, and if you’ve ever seen our original poster, it’s a silhouetted cartoon of a big guy and a little guy, nothing else,” says Teller, always to the right of the ampersand and forever the “little guy” in this poster. “It’s Penn’s profile and my profile, and we’re handcuffed together. That’s all there was. We never use the word ‘magic,’ which is something you send your kids to and is not for a serious theater audience.’”

Having clammed up about “magic,” what does Teller say instead?

“Nothing,” says the man who doesn’t speak onstage (well, he does speak, but you can find out for yourself when and how).

So the magic act that is really something else is back on Broadway at Marquis Theater through Aug. 16. This run marks the duo’s first series of Broadway shows since 1991, about a year before they debuted as a “New York act” at Bally’s Celebrity Room.

There is no apparent urgency for Penn & Teller’s return to New York other than the shows nearly coincide with their 40th anniversary as a performing duo, which is in about three weeks. No, this is optional artistry, an elective course in self-improvement that requires a cross-country booking more than a decade in the making.

It has taken so long because Penn & Teller are so very valuable to their Las Vegas hotel. Over the past 14 years, it has not been easy to convince entertainment officials at the Rio and Caesars Entertainment that it would be a good idea to allow an act that nearly sells out every show to leave for nearly two months.

Nor it is not an easy project to uproot the Penn & Teller operation in Las Vegas and move the empire to Manhattan. For starters, this requires finding a suitable rural residence for elephant impressionist Elsie the Cow, who is making a home in New Jersey and trucked into the city every day.

More telling: Glenn Alai, the duo’s executive director and confidante for nearly 25 years, says that this is the most challenging period of his entire time with the duo — and he lived through “Celebrity Apprentice.”

Twice.

“Why are we doing it? Because this is what we do,” Jillette says as he is being tended to in a makeup chair backstage at Marquis Theater an hour before Sunday night’s premiere. “But we have to be here because we’re just in a groove at the Rio, we’re doing the show at a high level, but we do not want to become too comfortable.”

Seated trimly at 225 pounds after dieting away more than 100 pounds since last fall, Penn is asked if Teller and he can be running at such a cozy altitude that they might actually start coasting — even subconsciously.

“Yeah, you know, you can work your ass off and still become complacent without knowing it. That’s what we are trying to prevent,” he says. “We’re in a groove in Las Vegas, and it works. Honestly, from a business standpoint, we do not need to be here. We are actually not making as much here as we would be in Las Vegas if you look at the huge production costs associated with putting this show in this theater.

“But, as performers, we need to be here.”

Certainly, after listening to Jillette’s assessment, there is no immediate financial benefit for the duo to performing at the 1,600-seat Marquis Theater, in which audiences have ranged from 1,300 to Sunday night’s sellout. The room is larger by only 100 seats than the Penn & Teller Theater at the Rio, and their sales numbers are comparable. But this is Broadway. The vibe, scene, media coverage and fan response are all intensified in New York.

Marquis Theater itself, sometimes compared to a cathedral, is big by Broadway and even Las Vegas standards, but, as Jillette says, “It feels smaller. The audience seems closer. The show feels a little quicker here, too. There is a different energy.”

The group of investors who brought Penn & Teller to New York for its first off-Broadway run 30 years ago has again put up the money to stage this run (Marc Routh, Richard Frankel, Tom Viertel and Steven Baruch get that credit). Alai is onboard as associate producer, added to his seemingly boundless contributions in public relations and schedule coordination.

The creative team is led by director John Rando (nominated for a Tony for “On the Town”), a smooth and congenial sort who provides an external set of editing eyes to tighten the show’s pace. Set designer Daniel Conway is a name familiar to P&T Las Vegas fans for his work on Teller’s production of “The Tempest” last year at the Smith Center. Lest we forget, Johnny Thompson, “The Great Tomsoni,” is a consultant, as he is dubbed “The Greatest Living Magician” by both performers and can spot a flaw in a show from the very back of the theater.

And Penn & Teller are not quite a two-man act onstage, either; statuesque showgirl assistant Georgie Bernasek reprises her role from the Rio. Piano great Mike “Jonesy” Jones performs before the show (with Penn on bass) and throughout the performance, nearly without pause. He has written eight new numbers for the production and promises that each one has lyrics (“But just for the cast Christmas album”). Those song segments might well be among the upgrades to the show in Las Vegas, as is the set, framed by images pulled from Teller’s old magic instructional books.

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Reviewers in this market and across the country as it plays in Marquis Theater have already dubbed the production something of a greatest-hits package. Included are old favorites “Turn On Your Cell Phone,” where an audience member cedes his smartphone and has it reappear later in a wrapped fish; “East Indian Needle Mystery,” where Teller gulps 100 needles followed by a string of thread and pulls them from his mouth in a single strand; “Nail Gun,” where Jillette fires a long series of shots from a nail gun into his hand and a plank of pine, with only the loaded rounds penetrating the wood; and “Shadows,” the act where Teller clips petals from a silhouette of a rose against a white sheet while the actual object also is pruned bare.

New to the production, and acts to be transferred back to the Rio, include “One Minute Egg,” where the duo break, separate and reassemble an egg in exactly 60 seconds; and, of course, “The Vanishing Elephant,” where Elsie vanishes and is replaced by some other farm animal as footage of Penn & Teller’s Secret Pasture plays on video screen. The clip shows the duo raising Elsie from a calf — which is what you call a young elephant — by bottle-feeding her milk at an undisclosed, secret location in Las Vegas. The Broadway crowd loves that even if many don’t make the connection between the Secret Pasture and Siegfried & Roy’s Secret Garden at the Mirage.

The reviews from Friday’s show have been predominantly, if not uniformly, praising.

Ben Brantley of the New York Times applauded the productions’ deceptive use of technology and teamwork, saying, “The gift of seeming up close and personal with an audience of thousands is a skill that Penn & Teller have been refining since the 1985 Off-Broadway show that propelled them into stardom in New York, and it may be their cleverest talent.”

Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press wrote, “There’s a subversive whiff to their show, whether it’s exploding myths about the metal detectors used by the Transportation Security Administration or vilifying so-called clairvoyants who prey on vulnerable people.”

From Linda Winer of Newsday: “Fourteen years in Las Vegas have neither mellowed their snark nor glitzed-up their essence in the production directed with friendly discipline by John Rando.”

A voice of dissent was that of the New York Daily News, which took issue with the show’s rollout of familiar acts, the review headline reading, “Penn & Teller on Broadway Review: The meh-gic show.”

Funny.

Having embarked on an aggressive marketing and PR campaign, being on a studio set (such as “CBS This Morning”) and in a newsroom (the duo visited the New York Post to perform a trick), the reviews do matter. Penn & Teller have not faced a serious critical onslaught in a very long time, as their show in Las Vegas has purred along for 14 years, and their one-offs across the country are only sparsely critiqued. Penn & Teller sought and found advance intel on how the entrenched reviewers, especially those in New York, viewed the show.

“We think we will do well here with the critics and the audiences,” Jillette says. “You have to remember that we have done this before.” As for the long-ranging impact, he says, “We will see an effect in ticket sales in Las Vegas. Whenever we are on national TV or national media, we see that. So it is important to be accepted positively, absolutely, and I think we will be.”

But at the end of this entire process, the audience that matters most are the two men onstage. Forty years as a duo, Penn & Teller still push their own limits, and each other. “I have studied vaudeville and seen the careers of these old vaudeville performers, where they do the same act from age 8 to 80. And at age 80, that act is better than it was at age 8. That kind of precision and discipline can make an entire career. When I watch Teller, I see that same precision and drive to be perfect.”

At ages 60 (Penn) and 67 (Teller), the magic men are revitalized, their show moving fast and nearly without flaw. Such small moments as when Penn tosses the audience member’s cell phone airborne over his shoulder into a bucket being carried by Teller are performed seamlessly. Always.

At the show’s close is an act far removed from the usual showstopper in Las Vegas, which is the simultaneous firing of pistols by Penn & Teller through plate glass into each other’s mouths (no measure of magic can persuade the city of New York to allow gunplay on a Broadway stage). Instead, Jillette takes a seat and describes the art of fire eating, explaining that there is no real secret to the trick, just a firm control and understanding of the flame itself.

You swallow lighter fluid during this act, he explains, as much as a teaspoon every time it’s performed. He performs the act five times a week in Las Vegas with no lingering harm, but carnies who have specialized in fire eating have performed it many times each day and sometimes need to take time away so their livers can regenerate. He talks, the theater darkened but for the fire, and spits flames into the air. Teller stands at Jillette’s side and casually lights a cigarette from his partner’s mouth.

This is the type of organic, time-honed act that sets Penn & Teller apart, and as they close the routine and say goodnight, the crowd instinctively stands. Then the duo hustle up the aisles and into the lobby to meet these fans, sign stuff and pose for selfies. Everyone seems to want to get to know Penn & Teller, even those who know them so well.

In the opening-night audience Sunday is a person who has seen Penn & Teller’s stage show more than 200 times, Emily Jillette, Penn’s wife. She is seated a few rows from the front of the stage, near the middle, and turns to watch her husband stride toward the exit. The crowd is still cheering, and Emily is smiling, nodding, her face a picture of pure joy.

What causes such a visceral reaction? It can be described in one word, the word Penn & Teller never need to use.

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.

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