Copperfield Mystifies, Delights Audience

David Copperfield, “Unknown Dimension” Monday, Dec. 18, Spokane Opera House

I am pleased to report that the 13 audience members who were made to disappear by magician David Copperfield on Monday night were discovered safe and sound minutes later in the back of the Opera House.

However, another audience member, a young man who embarked with Copperfield in a crane-like instant travel machine, “went” to a sunny beach in Bali, Indonesia, and never came back.

The rest of us should have been so lucky. We were still stuck in snowy Spokane (or “Spo-cain,” as Copperfield pronounced it).

This was all part of the fun at Copperfield’s traveling magic show, “Unknown Dimension.” If you’ve ever seen one of Copperfield’s many TV specials, you know what to expect: a lot of schmaltz, a lot of Vegas glitz, and a lot of good, creative show-biz magic.

The capacity crowd at Monday’s 9 p.m. performance seemed to love every minute of it, giving Copperfield a standing ovation even before the big mass-disappearance finale.

I, too, appreciated Copperfield’s good-natured foolery and his crew’s magical-technical savvy (you don’t even want to know how many fog machines, laser lights and hydraulic lifts are required to pull off these stunts). However, I couldn’t get over the feeling that Copperfield was just the tiniest bit bored by the whole thing.

And why not? He’s been doing this for decades and has been staging this show twice a night on tour (he had already done a 6 p.m. show at the Opera House that night). Plus, he knows how all of these illusions work. What makes the show magical for us is in the not knowing.

For instance, I am sure there is a perfectly rational explanation for how a live duck (Webster, one of the show’s more vivid personalities) made its way into an empty bucket held by an audience member.

And I am sure there is a mathematical explanation for how Copperfield could correctly guess the location of the “moon card” in a pack of eight cards given to every audience member. Each of us shuffled them and re-shuffled them, yet Copperfield was right in about 2,500 cases out of 2,600, and those 100 other people probably just didn’t follow instructions.

But the pleasure of a truly professional magic show comes in the lengths the magician will go to create an illusion just for us. This show delivered the goods, and nowhere as spectacularly as in that Bali trick.

The illusion was set up earlier by showing a “live video feed” from Bali, in which some Copperfield crew members are waiting on a beach. Then we see a heartwarming video about a single father and his estranged 21-year-old son, and how the father would love to fulfill a dream of taking his son to Bali.

The son just happens to be in the audience. Copperfield and the son climb aboard the Travel-a-tron (or whatever they called it) and vanish in a storm of fog and lights. They reappear on the “live video feed,” cavorting on the beach in Bali, where the son is reunited tearfully with the father.

Sure, you say, the kid was a plant and it’s all just a video trick. Then how do you explain the fact that a photo of several Spokane audience members also shows up on this Bali beach? And how do you explain the fact that Copperfield, in Bali, displays the two letters an audience member had written on his arm?

Don’t even try to figure it out. Do what the rest of us did Monday night: Marvel at the complexity and skill of the illusions, and indulge in just the briefest fantasy that maybe, just maybe, we could all be cavorting in Bali a few seconds from right now.