Tricks and Treats

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Nathan Burton gestures to the stack of Nathan Burton "Do Not Disturb" signs on the table in front of him and wonders what comedian George Wallace, his new theater roommate, will think.

"He’s a hustler," Burton says with admiration, not disparagement. "He’ll probably, be like, ‘Uh oh, why didn’t I think of this?’ "

And this — a new way to reach every room guest at the Flamingo Las Vegas — is what it takes to compete as a magician on the Strip these days.

When the sequins, German accents and million-dollar smiles disappeared in late 2003, so too, it seemed, did magic as a synonym for "Las Vegas entertainment." The tiger bite that critically injured Roy Horn (who has since made an impressive recovery) abruptly closed the Siegfried & Roy opus and left an open field to less-flashy competitors.

All of them claimed a different piece of the pie. You want traditional tuxedo? Lance Burton. Highbrow comedy? Penn & Teller. But none of them — not even part-year attraction David Copperfield — displace Cirque du Soleil as "the show ya gotta see" that Siegfried & Roy represented at their peak.

The entire genre could get another lift when "Criss Angel — Believe" opens Sept. 1 at Luxor. That one brings Cirque to the magic front and promises illusions never-before seen. But until then, the battle shifts to the daytime, where magicians pay to play and Nathan Burton’s straitjacketed torso will soon join Toni Braxton as a Flamingo building wrap. His show debuted Monday as the Flamingo’s afternoon attraction.

Up the street at the Sahara, Brett Daniels is a veteran new to the Strip, but he is friends with Burton and most of the city’s established players. Daniels figured his best shot at joining them is not to copy, but to offer something different: The murder-mystery themed "Wohscigam" ("Magic Show" spelled backward) harks back to the early-1900s era of magic featured in "The Prestige" and "The Illusionist," two movies fittingly about rival magicians.

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"Every magician wants to come to Vegas. It’s like Broadway for actors," says Nathan Burton. "That’s where magicians come."

Burton saw the alternatives, and at a young age. Before he was officially out of high school in Fort Smith, Ark., Burton was doing magic in Japan. Soon after that, he took a 10-minute act to Europe and South America.

"There are a lot of ‘V’ shows in Europe," he says, referring to "V — The Ultimate Variety Show" produced by his friend David Saxe. "Every city in Germany has a variety show."

Saxe caught him in an Atlantic City variety show and in April 2001 asked Burton and his then-wife Sara to join "Showgirls of Magic," which the fledgling producer had taken over from his mother.

Burton followed Saxe to The Venetian and then the V Theater adjacent to Planet Hollywood with the "V" show. He could have kept working as a specialty act forever, if not for his own entrepreneurial spirit and lucky breaks on two reality shows.

The first turned out to be a small step: "The Entertainer" refashioned "The Apprentice" for young performers, with Wayne Newton in the Donald Trump role. Interest in the E! cable show dropped quickly in early 2005, but Burton leveraged his screen time into news coverage for a publicity stunt: He purported to spend seven days locked in a clear box with seven showgirls.

The stunt cost him $70,000, but he still amortizes the box by using it as his show-opener. "It’s all about being creative," he says. "We don’t have the marketing budget of Blue Man (Group), or even Lance."

The second break came in the summer of 2006. Burton was busy trying to launch his own afternoon show at the V Theater, but something told him to stick with auditions for NBC’s "America’s Got Talent."

"It was the worst possible time to go," he says. And at the auditions, his crew suspected a "Gong Show" in the making and warned him, "You need to pack up, and we need to go."

But Burton hung in there, and ended up being MVP of a talent contest that was clearly making up its rules on the fly. He didn’t win, but "I did about 35 minutes of the content of my (stage) show" on national television. "I even performed in the finale when the winner did not," because the live broadcast ran long.

The results were, well, "very surreal." Burton told then-host Regis Philbin he was from Arkansas. "The next day, I had 300 e-mails from people in Arkansas."

"Talent" showcased Burton’s real strength as much as his comic twists on standard illusions. "People come to my show, and they seem to like me," he says.

"It’s about taking comedy illusions and connecting them with someone they’re gonna like," he adds. "You’ve got to connect with someone. If you see a performer you don’t connect with, you don’t care."

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"I’m putting my tail out there with this," Brett Daniels says of a show most people can neither spell nor pronounce: "Wohscigam." "If I was thinking about it, I would not do it. It’s scary."

But Daniels said he didn’t see room on the Strip for a magician who isn’t willing to try something new. He should know. He says he has licensed several illusions he created to the likes of Lance Burton, Nathan Burton and Hans Klok. That’s good for a revenue stream, but it also means "all of my things have been seen here, even though they were original in 1995."

So Daniels set aside most of his big-box illusions to focus on sleight-of-hand and card manipulation; those skills that magicians most respect in peer circles, but which seldom are performed on Las Vegas stages because the audience sits too far away.

Daniels attempts a two-fold solution to that in his new Sahara production. Video cameras offer close-ups of the tricks, which Daniels weaves into a narrative about the murder of a 1900s-era illusionist.

By doing so, he taps into a vein of revived interest in the Houdini era of magic, reflected in the big-selling book "Carter Beats the Devil," as well as the movies "The Prestige" and "The Illusionist."

He said he already was developing "Wohscigam" when the movies came out within months of each other in 2006, but they encouraged him: "OK, there might be an appetite for something of this nature."

Soon he will find out if his elaborate narrative will find an audience. "Everyone’s contemporary, trying to be cool and hip," he says. So he figures, "If you don’t know what to do, go the other way."

Still, he considers the show to be in its trial-and-error phase until at least next week. Though he won’t lose the Americana trappings, he may try "to hip it up a little bit." And if audiences don’t bite?

"You’ll come back and see me wearing sequins," he says with a laugh.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.