Now You See Me Live promises to bring film franchise’s magic to the stage

How desperately do you want to know how someone pulled off that magic trick?

It’s not supernatural. There’s a logical explanation for it that involves sleight of hand, physics and a little bit of razzle dazzle distraction. But if you go searching for answers, does that ruin the “magic”?

Gabrielle Lester is a magician and a specialist in escapology. She replicated Harry Houdini’s straightjacket escape while hanging upside down when she was 14 years old. People often come up after a show, asking how she did it. She never tells them.

“I ask all the time, she won’t even tell me!,” said Simon Painter, a stage producer who is mounting a live production of Now You See Me, inspired by the trilogy of films starring Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Isla Fisher and Lizzy Caplan as magicians called The Horsemen.

Now You See Me Live will have its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House on December 19, an expanded version of a smaller show that toured China before the Covid pandemic. It will then visit Brisbane and Perth in January.

Painter and his producing partner Tim Lawson have experience in this arena, having previously been responsible for magic show The Illusionists and its spin-offs, grossing over $US400 million in box office receipts around the world.

Adapting a film series gives Now You See Me Live an existing narrative framework, and Lester is playing the character of Henley Reeves, which Fisher portrayed in the first and third movies.

But what audiences will see on stage is not a rehash of what they might have already seen on screen. What it does take from the movies is The Horsemen, using the characters’ different specialties to stage what Painter called a “balanced” production which features a raft of different illusions.

“It’s piecing the elements together, and magic has so many difference facets and sleights-of-hand, and mind reading and hypnotism, a grand illusion and a stage illusion,” he said, and promised that his show would have combinations of individual and group tricks, some massive, some smaller, and some escapes.

Lester saw a street performer in London when she eight years old, and it was enough to get her hooked. The first trick she learnt was a card trick that she still performs today. It wasn’t immediate though, it took a few tries, and her family, who were her first audience members, were well over it by the time she nailed it.

But they have been supportive since, even if they were reluctant when she announced, at 13 years old, that she was going to attempt Houdini’s straightjacket escape.

“I wanted to make a bit of a splash and a dent in the magic world,” she recalled. “When I started hanging upside down on the monkey bars and told my parents that I was going to go to the fire department the next day and rent a fire truck (for the trick), they didn’t let me.

“But by the time I was 14, I did it upside down.”

Lester is only 22 years old now, so this was all relatively recent history (she was 10 years old when the first Now You See Me movie was released), but she’s almost a veteran at this point.

She worked to get her 10,000 hours on stage, performing in any environment she could, from the backroom of a bar and corporate gigs to massive arenas.

“There’s only so much practice you can do in your living room, especially with magic. It’s all about the audience,” she told The Nightly.

“A lot of my performance style is about crowd work and the audience. A really good performer isn’t doing the same show every night, they’re doing their material but they’re listening to the crowd and they’re working with their volunteers.”

Like any performance, like Shakespeare or opera or dance, it’s the story you tell and whether you can bring the audience with you, put them in a space so they believe what they’re seeing – or not seeing.

Painter said the film franchise – the third instalment, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, was released in November and is still playing in cinemas – has made magic cool again.

“It’s very hip, the way they’re dressed, the way they talk, the way it’s presented in the modern day, and they’re solving problems.

“I suppose the modern day Robin Hood (theme), in terms of the way they’re using magic for something cool, that makes it relevant and it doesn’t look schlocky or old-fashioned. That’s what we’ve done with this show.

“It’s a slick show, it doesn’t feel like it’s old Siegfried and Roy 1985.”

He’s also confident the illusions will remain mysterious. Even if you did go home and Google how a trick was done, you probably wouldn’t find the correct version.

“It’s hard to explain but there are a million different ways of making a thing appear on stage. Now you can Google ways to make an object appear but what a good magician does, is not about what you do but the way you do it,” he said.

“It’s the storytelling, it’s the journey that they take you on. How the magic works, technically, is secondary. It’s the emotion the magic brings. That’s the most important thing.”

Now You See Me Live premieres at Sydney Opera House on December 19, Brisbane’s QPAC on January 8 and Perth’s Crown Theatre on January 23