It’s the setup and delivery, the trick and the showmanship, the nervous feeling of watching someone walk a tightrope, and the quick laugh from a clever quip. It looks both easy and, at the same time, somehow impossible.
So here we are, and we’re having fun. We’re laughing, a little on the edge of our seats, and then we’re quiet and all the way on the edge of our seats. And then, if we’re lucky and the magician is so good it doesn’t look like he’s spent a lifetime mastering the trick, we get what Jonah Lehrer in his remarkable 2021 book Mystery: a Seduction, a Strategy, a Solution calls the “Magic Gasp.”
The “Magic Gasp” is the moment that defies logic. It’s inexplicable. It’s the point everything in the act has been building to, but we still can’t believe it when it arrives. Though the Chicago Magic Lounge laundromat entrance is funky and cool, the food is good, and the vibe is just right, the “Magic Gasp” is what we came for. There’s nothing like it. Nothing at all.
It’s the feeling we get watching the close-up table magic of Ben Barnes before the show. He tells us it’s going to be the most amazing thing we will see all night, then he holds the deck eighteen inches from my face and jumps my daughter’s card from the middle to the top of the deck, and then he holds the deck even closer to my face and does it again!
And it’s the moment we get from Justin Purcell’s An Honest Living.
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As one of Chicago Magic Lounge’s founders and current House Magicians, Justin Purcell is no stranger to the CML stage. In 2019, Chicago Magazine wrote Purcell performed “with the aplomb of a ringmaster and the flair of a standup comedian” when they named him “Chicago’s Best Bar Magician.”
With his new show, An Honest Living, Purcell blends his signature brand of wit and humor with a lifetime spent honing his close-up magic craft.
Watching Justin Purcell is like watching a friend who tells us he “likes to do a little magic.” So we watch for a while, and at first, we think he’s funny but also kinda good. And he’s telling jokes, and he keeps saying, “Magic is real!” but he’s saying it in a way that makes us think it’s all just silly, and he doesn’t really mean it. And we are waiting for the moment when he goes a little too far, and the coins fall out of his sleeve, or he holds up the wrong card, but the tricks keep getting better, and it’s all going right. And he’s still cracking jokes and telling us, “Magic is real!” And we’re kinda believing it now, and we’re with him because we are all either involved or involved adjacent. And the tricks keep getting better and better, and we’re all noticing, but he doesn’t seem to be noticing. He just keeps cracking jokes, and he just pulled a full glass of beer out of what was an empty bag, and then…
Here’s the thing. It’s hard to explain, but it’s what makes An Honest Living good, so let’s give it a try. Justin Purcell is an excellent magician and a clever showman, but he genuinely wants to get the “Gasp” with the skill of his craft, not some schtick. If you know magic, there’s a good chance you’ve seen much of his act before. Coin tricks, card tricks, magic rings, the envelope trick, the lemon trick, pulling a rabbit out of a hat (or, in this case, pulling progressively larger stuff out of an empty bag), but Purcell’s on another level. Coins everywhere, card tricks involving six audience members at once, bigger rings, etc… you get it. But there’s no endzone dance. There’s no “ta-dah!” There’s no tiger, no Statue of Liberty. His musical effects are intentionally corny, and when he uses anything extra–the backstage camera takes us nowhere, and his assistant Annette is just a net–it’s pretty clear he’s teasing the idea. He’s fully aware of what he’s doing, but he laughs it off with a joke, tells us, “Magic is real!” again like we all know it’s not, and then he moves on to something even better. But it works.
As Purcell gets deeper into the performance, it starts to feel like our friend who likes to do a little magic is actually really, really good, and he hopes we’ll notice, but if we don’t watch closely, we might not get how good he is. And make no mistake, he’s really good.
And at some point, between the laughs, we gasp, and it turns out he’s been right all along. The magic is real.
Tickets for all Chicago Magic Lounge shows are available at the box office, (312) 366-4500, or online at chicagomagiclounge.com