“Mind-numbing.” “Jaw-dropping.” “Eye-opening.”
All of these terms are used in the official promotional material for Andrew Pinard’s Discovering Magic show, which occurs monthly at Hatbox Theatre. It might sound like a bunch of hyperbole, but after going to the show last week, I think the description actually undersells what Pinard does in that little theater.
Pinard, who owns Hatbox, has been working his magic for years, and the practice has paid off.
His real expertise is in the sleight of hand. If this magic thing doesn’t work out for him, he definitely has a future in professional pick-pocketing (though we wouldn’t encourage that).
The act is nothing extravagant – rope tricks, card tricks, ball-and-cup tricks – but that’s the beauty of it. Everything seems so simple, yet nothing makes sense. Every trick elicits a “huh?” and a chuckle of befuddlement.
It’s also a show that gets everybody involved. The act relies on members of the audience being active participants, and this particular show got just about every person in attendance into the show in some way or another – including this Insider.
I’d never seen a Discovering Magic show before, so when I heard that audience participation was a big part of it, I reached out to Pinard to see if I could check it out and be involved in a show.
He granted me permission, but we had never met and he didn’t know what I looked like, so I was nervous he would have no way to know who I was and thus not be able to get me into the show.
It turns out I didn’t need to worry about that, because I was called on anyway – twice.
My first task was simple: pick a card, any card. I drew the nine of diamonds, showed it around, held it for a minute then put it back in the deck. Two other people from the crowd did the same thing.
Without giving too much away, Pinard found our cards in impressive and mind-blowing fashion.
Later in the show I was chosen to approach the table for the classic ball-under-the-walnut-shell game. After a few rounds of keeping my eye on the ball – where that expression came from, according to Pinard, who admitted that he is a serial liar – the mind-blowing stuff came out again.
I placed a shell over a small ball, knowing for sure that the ball was under there (or did I?), then placed a shot glass over the shell, keeping my finger on top to make sure nobody was pulling any fast ones.
Pinard then did some routine with the remaining shells and told me to lift the glass, then the shell. By this point I knew what I would find – nothing! What? I still have no idea what happened there, but the ball just disappeared.
A major element to Discovering Magic is making the audience think about big, heady things. For instance, when I put the ball under the opaque shell, he asked, “Do you know for sure that the ball is under there?” Earlier in the show he asked the same thing after putting a ball into an opaque bag. You can’t really answer “yes” if you don’t know for sure, if you can’t see it. Our brain expects that it will be there when he turns the bag inside out, but we can’t know for sure (he proves this by revealing an empty bag).
Really, this is a lot more than your run-of-the-mill magic show. This is an exercise for your brain, with fun, amazement and laughter as the vehicle.
Check out the next Discovering Magic performance at Hatbox Theatre on Feb. 8 at 7:30 p.m.
