I went to see Ricky Jay in person for the first time on December 1. A couple of weeks ago, I saw an ad in the Reader (there’s a preview of the show on their blog) about his new show: “A Rogue’s Gallery: An Evening of Conversation and Performance”, and eventually decided to buy a ticket, even though it was expensive ($80 after the fee, and this without Ticketmaster!), and the seat was in the very last row of the balcony. I really couldn’t bring myself not to go; I saw a recording of his first off-breadway show, “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants”, a couple years ago and was blown away. He lives in Los Angeles and performs just a few times a year at most, usually there or in New York. My friend Craig, who’s the only person I know who’s a bigger magic enthusiast (See how I didn’t say nerd? You’re welcome!) than I am, talked me into going. Ricky Jay performs vanishingly rarely in Chicago, and being in his 60s, probably won’t take the show on the road that much longer. I needn’t have worried about the seat; the Royal George Theater’s main room seats around 500, but in any case I could see the man quite clearly without the binoculars I brought.
The Rogue’s Gallery in the ad refers to 108 photos, playbills, and other artifacts from Jay’s personal and substantial archive. Along with being one of the finest magicians of our time, he is an author of multiple books on various areas of his interest: the use of playing cards as weapons, the many-splendored and fascinating ways humans have entertained one another over the centuries, the possibly more greatly-splendored and fascinating ways we have cheated one another while gambling, and many other areas.
In “52 Assistants”, which he still performs from time to time, he discusses parts of the history of conjuring and cheating while performing jaw-dropping sleight of hand with playing cards. In Rogue’s Gallery, there is more history than before, maybe 60% storytelling to 40% magic. The show I saw started off with a poem written for him by Shel Silverstein, a tale of a man challenging him to a game of cards in a windowless room locked from the outside, where the challenger is sure to beat this master magician. After being beaten and losing all his money, the challenger pulls a gun, at which point Ricky Jay fends off and kills the man with his playing cards. The reading is dramatic, and punctuated by throwing cards from the stage into the light of a spotlight maybe 20-30 feet away, dead center.
After this opening, the Rogue’s Gallery is revealed, projected on a screen toward the back of the stage. Throughout the show, Ricky Jay either chooses a photo himself based on whatever he wants to discuss at the moment, or gets audience members to choose them using direct or oblique questions. Sometimes he just asked for folks to shout a number, or he’d choose a person and ask them how many pretzels there are in an average $1 bag of pretzels (“92? That’s a big bag. Okay, let’s see #92…”). Other times it went like this:
Ricky Jay: Is there anyone here who has a birthday tonight?
(Woman in a box seat raises her hand)
RJ: Excellent. So it’s your actual birthday today?
Woman: Yes.
RJ. Wonderful. How old do you think I am?
(We all laugh, he’s so droll.)
Woman: … Sixty-two?
RJ: You’re wrong, but let’s look at #62.
We saw maybe 20-25 examples from the gallery the night I was there. They included a photo of Charlie Miller, one of Ricky Jay’s two biggest influences and mentors; a ghostly photo that Ricky Jay hopes, but can’t know for sure, is of Le Pétomane, the French virtuoso of the creative passing of wind; various playbills from circuses; a set of dice from his massive and deteriorating collection (photographs thereof comprise another of his books); and a painting of Sigfried and Roy that led to an interesting story of a friend of his getting peed on, very forcefully and impressively, by one of those gentlemen’s white tigers.
Several of the photos had attendant video clips. We saw a scene from a film in which Ricky Jay demonstrates his amazing card control while explaining to a fellow character why he doesn’t play poker with his friends, a clip from current TV show FlashForward in which he plays a not-overly-wholesome but apparently wholy-murderous person, and a clip of Steve Martin performing as Flydini (his clever magic routine in which he produces all manner of things from his unzipped fly).
I wasn’t sure how much performing we were to expect, but fortunately there was quite a lot. The first bit of magic produced one of my favorite moments of the evening. Two volunteers, a man and a woman, came up on stage and stood on either side of Jay. One shuffled the cards while the other chose one, which eventually Ricky Jay produced without having seen. In perparing the second effect with these two volunteers, Jay told the man to shuffle the cards again, to which he instantly replied “Why?” We all laughed quite a bit, including Ricky Jay, who took a little while to stop laughing and regain his composure, saying “Oh, that’s wonderful… Do you like to travel?” I love moments where the performer is taken out of his preparation and finely-honed routine that way, where it’s funny and respectful at the same time.
Later on, a volunteer was called up and rolled a die five times, each time eliminating one of six bags, so that eventually one remained, the contents of which she would win. Instead of the leftover order of General Tso’s chicken, a hair net, or various other useless ephemera, she ended up with a copy of Ricky Jay’s book on dice, which somehow ended up inscribed with her name.
The show closed with a somewhat athletic display of mental agility. Two volunteers were brought up onstage, and a blackboard with a numbered chess board drawn on was rolled out. The setup took a while, but eventually Ricky performed a “knight’s journey”, where he started from a square chosen by a member of the audience at random, and called out numbered squares that were legal moves of a knight in chess, without looking at the board. By the time he was done, all 64 squares had been hit exactly once by this traveling knight, with no mistakes. That might have been impressive enough, but he interspersed this by naming the cube roots of cubes between 1 and 1 million (the other volunteer had cards to read from with the cubes and their roots), reciting parts of a Shakespearean comedy chosen by the audience (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and singing old field hollers. It was not the simplest effect to perform or track as an audience member, but impressive nonetheless.
For the encore, he declined an audience member’s shouted request to tell a story about Jay Marshall, a Chicago magician and friend of his who died a few years ago (and to whom the show was dedicated), instead performing an elegant card production. It was a fitting conclusion to a delightful evening with the great magician.
My other favorite moment of the evening happened as I was leaving. I overheard some older men talking about the show, one of whom said he hadn’t expected magic, had no idea what to expect. That sort of surprised me, since I expected most people there knew who he was, or were with someone who did, and would have explained his towering stature in the magic community. But that wasn’t the best part. After explaining to his friend how he thought one of the effects worked, he went on to say “I mean, he’s obviously not a magician. He’s an actor who dabbles in a magic as a hobby.” I almost fainted, almost grabbed him by the lapels, almost asked him who writes his material, but instead just shook my head and kept walking. In my musical life, I always hope to be able to perform in any given musical style such that I “speak like a native”, or at least make it sound like a really know what I’m doing. The danger there is that someone might think that’s all I can do, and I might miss an opportunity to do something else. Maybe that’s what happened with Ricky Jay in this guy’s eyes; he was such a good storyteller that the guy thought that must be what he really does. That’s one way I hadn’t expected anyone in the audience to be fooled.
If you have any interest in magic or like to be fully engaged mantally with your entertainment (whether or not you consider yourself a fan of magic), I think it’s hard to go wrong with Ricky Jay. If you get the chance, go check him out.
Here are a couple other reviews of the show from locals:
