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TV Review: Magician's tricks inspire awe and confusion
Wednesday, April 14, 1999 By Tony Norman, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
David Blaine is such a skilled magician he even manages to make common sense disappear.
On "David Blaine: Magic Man" airing tonight on ABC, the Brooklyn born entertainer has no trouble finding people eager to demonstrate their willing suspension of disbelief for the cameras.
With his second ABC special, Blaine criss-crosses America wowing rubes and sophisticates alike.
From a Manhattan street corner where super model Tyra Banks confuses his sleight of hand with deviltry to a ritual hut in Haiti, astonished onlookers can't make up their minds whether the 25-year-old magician is Mesmer or Christ.
While watching Blaine "resurrect" the fly a New York cop previously swatted you know it's nothing more than an elaborate trick, though darned if you can explain it.
"It wasn't 'New York City' dead, but it was dead enough," a cop says.
When Blaine takes his magic Uptown to West 113th Street, the corner boys are waiting for him, hard and streetwise. But a few well executed card tricks persuade the magician's audience that Blaine is, without a doubt the baddest guy in Harlem that afternoon.
Most of the fun of "David Blaine: Magic Man" is watching the reactions of awed onlookers as they try to reconcile his tricks with their understanding of how things work. Will they run away like the women who shriek when Blaine "removes" the head of a live chicken only to restore it to perfectly functioning order a few seconds later? Or will they quietly accept the impossible like a little girl in Nashville who "reads" Blaine's mind at his prompting?
"I'm an entertainer, " Blaine says vainly trying to convince a Haitian that what he does isn't black magic. When he instructs a washer woman to bend a coin by balling up her fist, she isn't amused. "You broke my cents," she says indignantly, a bent coin gleaming in her hand. "I need my cents."
Blaine knows how to pick his marks for maximum benefit. His most impressive trick comes near the end of the show when he asks a woman out on the town with her boyfriend to think of the name of someone who means a lot to her. She does, but writes nothing down. He stares in her eyes whispering "give it to me." She blinks. He tells her the name she's thinking of is short and has a double meaning.
The woman blinks again. Just then a cab drives by with the name "Dawn." The woman freaks and says she's going to a bar to get "some shots."
How does he do it? Like the begger who serenades the magician at the end of the show with a verse from "Betcha' By Golly Wow" we can only say the obvious about the magician: "there's a spark of magic in his eyes."
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When: Tonight at 10 on ABC.