Seen It All Before

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I’m tempted to recommend "The Beauty of Magic" as a throwback for anyone who misses the Siegfried & Roy show, circa 1993.

Except that nobody ever had to wait an hour for Roy to show up.

You have to sit through about 50 minutes of pointing and posturing from Dutch magician Hans Klok to get 10 or 12 minutes of Pam Anderson, the marquee star whose micro-shorts were meant to add contemporary interest to this dated and unintentionally campy magic revue at Planet Hollywood.

Klok is the blond magician with the endearing accent, and for a few minutes at least, Anderson is the stage partner who shares the loopy banter. There’s even an evil queen (Zarina Potapova) to death-trap our hero in this production directed by Anthony Van Laast, who was part of the creative team behind the groundbreaking "Siegfried & Roy at The Mirage."

But even if you don’t miss the white tigers, you’re sure to realize you can’t go back and capture the timing and context of the Mirage production that turned the corner into a new era of Las Vegas entertainment. Or so we thought.

The lights go down and you can’t believe Klok is making his grand entrance by materializing in the ol’ smoke chamber, a clear cylinder that has fogged up to reveal many the star of many a lower-budget show.

Then you really, truly can’t believe you’re hearing "Night on Bald Mountain" as Klok proceeds to wheel out just about every contraption you’ve seen up and down the Strip, from Nathan Burton a few yards down the Miracle Mile hallway to Lance Burton at the Monte Carlo.

But, as the Wizard of Oz might say, he’s got one thing they haven’t: fans. Every time he completes an illusion, Klok cools himself off by striking a pose in front of some unseen box fan that blows his golden tresses back in an early-MTV-video-by-Warrant-or-the-Scorpions kinda way.

Granted, all this may be new and more dazzling if you’ve never seen a big-stage magic revue. Maybe. Klok prides himself on being the fastest magician in the business, a claim that can work for and against him.

He could be talking about the speed with which he and different female assistants (including Anderson) rapidly switch places in an illusion alternately known in the trade as the "subtrunk" or "metamorphosis." They move fast all right, but after the fourth or fifth variation, we get it already.

Or we could be talking about the speed at which Klok burns through the various illusions. I’m guessing they were thinking, "Well, it’s a short attention span era and we got all this junk, so let’s not waste time padding the action."

But the thing is, the padding is really a form of storytelling. Without any buildup or preamble, there’s no punch line.

A specific example: Maybe you’ve seen the "snow" illusion often credited to Kevin James of "The World’s Greatest Magic Show" at the Greek Isles. Typically, the magician plays some sappy John Williams movie theme and sits on the front steps for a little nostalgic heart to heart with the audience, remembering when he played in the snow as a kid, or visited Grandpa on the farm. He makes a paper snowflake or wads up a napkin, dunks it in water and soon, a blizzard of snowflakes shower forth from his closed hands.

But here? The illusion is a silent throwaway. He dunks the Kleenex. Snow blows. No set up, no payoff.

The sappiness instead comes from a connecting thread in which actors playing Klok as a boy and his grandfather go for a tour that takes the show to Paris, New York and India, where dudes in turbans bust out a break dance. But the little story never comes to any conclusion, and I still can’t figure out how it figures in with evil queens or film footage of a DaVinci-style flying machine.

After all this, the words tumble like Shakespeare when Anderson finally materializes, larger than life (or at least Jessica Rabbit), and declares, "I’d go anywhere for a Klok." If she keeps this job, her routine with an audience volunteer and a magical "prediction board" might even get as smooth as Melinda the First Lady of Magic once did it.

There were reports that Anderson was getting about $4 million for this summer job. That’s dubious, but even if she’s getting half that for 12 minutes of work each night, here’s a suggestion: four minutes in the first half-hour, four in the second and four in the third.

And if she should work hard enough to actually break a sweat? Don’t Bogart those fans, Hans.