Safety Is No Illusion in the World of Magic

Love explains that she is a magician herself, and she mentions the added stress the crew has been under because of Chicago’s strict union rules. It’s an Operational Risk, really, that they were not expecting. The team only has a certain amount of time to be on the stage after the performance to get things ready for the next show. It’s not like that in England, she opines. She then asks me if they have similar rules in other U.S. cities.

I have no idea, but I tell her that, knowing a bit about Chicago, I have to believe they are something not-so special to the Windy City.

Getting back to her story, she tells me she was a bit hesitant at first to become Allan’s assistant a few years ago because of her background in performing magic herself.

I mention that it’s interesting that we are still only seeing women sawed in half in magic. Why not men? Love smiles and tells me that when she works as the lead magician she uses a male assistant, and yes, she has cut a dude in half.

Not literally, of course.

Shortly after, Allan reappears in the dressing room. He, too, mentions the union rules and seems a bit stressed by them. He apologizes for the delay, and we sit and have our chat about magic, safety and risk. You know, the usual prestidigitation conversation. Not!

Allan tells me they had to remove what he considers one of his most impressive illusions from the show I was at because one of his assistants was ill. I sort of wondered about this during the performance because all the advertising I’d seen showed the levitation illusion, but it was nowhere to be found. Allan then explains that his assistant offered to work through the illness, but Allan smartly pointed out that doing so put him and the rest of his crew at risk of catching the same virus. Since this is Allan’s first tour of the United States, there’s no time to be sick. It would be the quickest way to make momentum disappear.

“The levitation we take very seriously,” Allan says, “which is why we decided not to do it in that performance that you saw. And that was a hard one, because if there was ever a time I wanted to push to do it, it would have been the day that all the press was in. It’s possibly our biggest, most spectacular trick, and I had to face the prospects of pulling it out due to illness, but safety always comes first.”

As we’re talking, I bring up something that was on my mind technology and risk. If my phone doesn’t work properly, I won’t be able to record the interview, I explain. For a magician who relies a great deal on technology with his iPad-based illusions and such, I ask how he prepares for a possible tech failure during his show.

He tells me his iPads, for instance, have only failed him three times during a performance, and “we always have an out. Wherever possible, we have a backup plan. And if something fails, we just go into something else.”

Allan also mentions some differences between performing in the United Kingdom vs. the United States when it comes to high- tech toys like lasers and more common technology like electricity. For the lasers Allan uses in the show, he says there are more rules in the United States when it comes to using them in open spaces, so training staff is highly important to stay in compliance.

Allan then turns his attention to something that hadn’t dawned on me: electricity. Being a British magician, he explains that they had to get AC/DC converters for all their electrical equipment.

“The biggest issue that we have transferring our show from Europe to the U.S. was power,” he says. “We’ve had to spend an inordinate amount of money on changing over voltages. We don’t draw a massive amount of power, but we do have an incredible amount of devices on the stage.”

And electricity can be a sizable risk in a magic show.

“My show’s not so much a danger show,” Allan says, “so usually the danger in our show is either going to come from electricity, it’s going to come from height or it’s going to come from confined spaces.”

He continues, “Now things like the water, in our case, I think it’s more about we’re trying to present things as dangerous when we know we’re completely confident that we can do it very safely. And I think the hardest thing, when you’re doing it night [after] night, is to remember that it can be dangerous and not to start to take things for granted.”

Indeed, the most dangerous trick Allan performed in the show I saw was the “Water Torture Cell” escape. He credits his production manager, Tommy Bond, with establishing the proper protocols to keep him and his assistant safe in the tank and elsewhere on stage. “Tommy is the key to everything safety, particularly with everything that’s electronic. The thing we’ve almost had an issue with a couple of times, and we take very seriously now, is actually the electricity and the water,” Allan explains. “The most likely thing that’s going to cause an injury with that is something to do with electricity.”

“Electrocution?” I ask.

“Mmm-hmm,” he confirms.

Of course, training is of the utmost importance to get things right show after show. “So we teach each individual element,” he says. “We go through, you know, just being in the tank, getting out of the tank, the water, and the person who’s going into it. Everything is just modular, and then eventually we put it together, you know, in a walkthrough. Then we slowly build up the speed.”

Just don’t tell mum you’re about to do it.

“I’ve never explained to family before I was doing it [the “Water Torture Cell” or any other risky trick], because they’d always inherently think it’s a bad idea,” he confides.

And the trick, itself, is never pleasant, he says, but the adrenaline rush after he emerges sopping wet from the tank with his assistant then positioned inside the tank is what makes it worth it. The biggest risk, as with any business endeavor is complacency. People can take things for granted after doing them over and over again.

“I don’t mind telling you,” he adds, “I’ve got a guy at the back of the stage that’s got his eyes on me the whole time. He’s not involved in the presentation of it. His sole job is to watch me and to see that I’m doing what I should be doing at the right time because, if I’m not, then he’s got time, nobody else, to come forward and open it. Screw the trick. You know, just no round of applause is worth that.”

Of course, the “Water Torture Cell” is not the only potentially dangerous trick around the block.

Allan brings up the aforementioned bullet man, William E. Robinson, along with the 12 other magicians who have been killed performing similar tricks “catching” a bullet over the years. “I don’t think [it’s] a trick that any performer should perform anywhere anymore because I feel that it’s just in bad taste,” he says. Robinson “used to maintain his own rifles because he didn’t want anybody to know the secret of the rifle. The secret was that he had like a musket that had another barrel on the top where you used to use the ramrod to clean the gun, and … the ramrod used to go inside there. So what he did was diverted the chamber so that actually the piece that contained the ramrod actually fired the shots.”

From there, “he’d put the bullet for real into the actual chamber, but that wouldn’t fire anything. Then he’d take the ramrod out and push it and then conveniently not put the ramrod back in, just leave it. So when the guy would fire it, the charge would come, but over repeated use it had slowly blown away at the chamber … because they were putting real gunpowder in the real chamber the audience saw. Then one day it ignited the real gunpowder and shot the bullet. I mean, that’s got to be the worst method you could possibly use for that trick. I mean it’s nuts.”

Being a Houdini fan myself—“While Howard Thurston was busy being the best magician on the planet, Houdini was busy becoming a legend. And he’s become more famous every year since his death,” Allan says—I find this all fascinating, and I could ask many more questions but I’m on a time crunch so I politely end the interview.

Love shows me how to get out of the building and asks if they can keep the copy of Spark that I brought with. “Of course,” I say, apologizing for bringing only one issue with me.

She says that that isn’t a problem because the two magicians are “together; I don’t think that’s a secret.”

Perhaps not, but there are many other secrets in the magic world that help keep magicians and their colleagues safe while performing potentially dangerous illusions without any hocus-pocus.