Former Schaumburg resident pushes magic’s boundaries with ‘Illusionists’
By Scott C. Morgan for the Daily Herald..
llusionist Dan Sperry didn’t always look like shock rocker Marilyn Manson’s scary sibling.
Before Sperry amazed audiences with his creepy illusions like swallowing razor blades or tugging a strand of dental floss through his neck – a trick that notoriously freaked out judge Howie Mandel during Sperry’s run on the 2010 season of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” – the Minnesota native and former Schaumburg resident dressed as an old-school magician for numerous Chicago-area performances at elementary schools and kid’s birthday parties.
“When I was younger, I kind of went with the classic magician look with tails and playing cards, but offstage I’d be into punk music, Alfred Hitchcock and horror films like the old-school Universal Studios monster movies or those by director John Carpenter,” Sperry said. “Mid-to-late teens, I let some more of who I was offstage in real life trickle into my onstage performances.” Read more.. http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20150308/entlife/150309342/
Smoothini on America’s Got Talent. One of the early front-runners on this years AGT is Smoothini, The Ghetto Houdini, aka. Tomas B. De la Cruz Jr of New York. Watch this bar magician do his magic.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Good magic, bad magic: ‘America’s Got Talent’ casts its spell..
By Lawrence Specker for AL.com
If I could only pass along one lesson from Tuesday’s episode of “America’s Got Talent,” it would be this: Out of all the places a magician can go with traditional card tricks, his own posterior cleavage should not be one of them.
No, really. It happened. “Mad Jack” invited Howard Stern to pick a card, then dropped the deck down his backside, shook it out the leg of his pants … then dropped his waistband and asked Stern to see if that was his card, you know, back there. It probably works great in bars, which Mad Jack described as his normal habitat, but in this context it earned him the hook. Show host Nick Cannon praised the censor who spared viewers a graphic view of the situation…