Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

‘America’s Got Talent’ winner Shin Lim is ready for Vegas stage

Shin Lim

Courtesy

Shin Lim headlines five shows at Paris Las Vegas this weekend.

A trained pianist who moved from music to sleight-of-hand magic after being diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, Shin Lim thinks about and creates performance in his own unique way. He doesn’t speak to his audience when manipulating playing cards and making objects disappear, relying on dramatic music and perfectly timed movements to captivate the crowd.

It’s a fresh take on a classic art, and it’s the reason he won season 13 of “America’s Got Talent” in September. Lim is headlining five shows of “AGT Live” at the Paris Theater this weekend with other finalists from the competition show: singer Courtney Hadwin, comedians Vicki Barbolak and Samuel J. Comroe and trapeze and stunt artists Mary Ellen Wolfe and Tyce Nielsen, aka Duo Transcend.

For Lim, a 27-year-old artist born in Vancouver, the Paris shows are the first step toward a strong Strip presence. He’s already received multiple offers for a Las Vegas residency.

“I would love to have a residency here and it would be super cool, and I’m getting a lot of requests so that’s very good news,” he says. “Before ‘AGT’ I never even imagined that I’d be able to pick. I always thought I’d be lucky to get offered one.”

Lim is no stranger to Vegas, having appeared on “Penn & Teller: Fool Us” four times and making the trip to the Rio to join the duo’s show twice. He gathered enough time to go to David Copperfield’s illusion-filled spectacular at MGM Grand on this visit, but Friday night’s show at the Paris will be Lim’s first proper performance.

He names longtime Strip magician Lance Burton as one of biggest influences and inspirations: “His style was just something I was attracted to, classy but modest, and he had sleight of hand in his show which really intrigued me.”

Lim found his own style while performing in China before any of his big TV appearances. He was still speaking during his act, and while he speaks some Chinese, the audience there was having a hard time understanding him “because I had an American accent,” he says. “I thought, I might as well just not talk. So I did it silently to music and the reactions were even louder and better. I thought, oh my God, I’m onto something, and just went with it.

“Probably the hardest thing to do is create this dramatic atmosphere without all the showgirls and spaceships and stuff like that. It has a lot to do with the subtleties of editing the music and the act itself, changing certain things for visual appeal. You don’t need these grand things to still have an epic atmosphere in the show.”

“America’s Got Talent Live Las Vegas” will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 2, and 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 3-4 at the Paris Theater at Paris Las Vegas (3655 Las Vegas Blvd. South, 702-777-2782) and more information can be found at caesars.com.