Magic Roadshow

By MIKE WEATHERFORD – LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

What were you doing on New Year’s Eve? Looking at fireworks or the bottom of a Champagne glass? Or were you among the 1.4 million people who watched at least some of a two-hour game of Jenga, played by Rick Lax and his friends on Facebook.

It was a fitting way for Lax to end the year. The magician spent most of it building up a phenomenal Facebook following for the short, interactive magic tricks he creates on a laptop in his Henderson condominium.

If you haven’t heard of Lax, you aren’t one of his 3.3 million Facebook followers. Or one of the 61 million people who have played along with a couple of his mind-reading tricks.

But don’t feel too bad. Lax isn’t a live performer on the Strip. He sold the concept for SyFy’s “Wizard Wars” but never performed on that competition show either.

“I don’t want to do a Vegas show. There’s a lot of good shows on the Strip. I’m not going to make the mistake of the ‘Band of Magicians,’” he says, referring to a recent Tropicana flop involving some of his performer friends. Read more..

http://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/columns/mike-weatherford/magicians-social-media-numbers-explode-beyond-their-live

Known primarily as the silent partner in magic’s most unorthodox act, Raymond Joseph Teller doesn’t have to be as concerned about maintaining his mute persona—apart from onstage and on Penn & Teller’s television show Fool Us—as he used to. He spoke with Las Vegas Magazine’s Matt Kelemen about the direction he and Penn Jillette’s long-running show at the Rio has taken lately, and new elements that rekindle the joy of discovering magic for both Penn & Teller and their audience.

The addition of new bits such as the participatory “Love Ritual” card trick and “King of the Animal Traps” closer make the show seem fresh. Have you been consciously moving it in a new direction?

This show has a slightly different feel from previous shows, and the sense that I have is that it’s a little more sort of totally inclusive of everybody. Everybody gets to participate in the “Love Ritual” card trick, and then right after that we invite everyone onstage and surround our African spotted pygmy elephant Elsie before she disappears. And so there’s a sense towards the end of the show, everybody is really part of the gang, and it feels really friendly and happy and generous and sort of innocent to me. And I like that feeling a lot. The closing bit in the show, instead of being about the risk of death, which is always fun, is a sort of a sweet reminiscence of childhood, albeit completely fraudulent. Read the whole interview at:

https://lasvegasmagazine.com/interviews/qa/2017/jan/13/qa-teller-rio-penn-jillette-magic-fool-us/#/0