Like an acrobat or a sword swallower, a magician always flirts with the risk of getting it wrong, which lends such spectacles their tension. Some of the allegories don’t work as well, although there’s a vulnerability on display that excuses the show’s occasional dead ends.ĭelGaudio designed “In & of Itself” as a collective live experience, and there is no direct equivalent for those watching at home. The disappearing brick trick is almost beside the point - although it’s fun to see it pay off over the end credits. Same goes for a later segment, in which a brick suspended in a shattered window is given new context as he tells of the bullying endured after his mother came out as gay. When he takes a half-empty whiskey bottle from one of half a dozen chambers in the stage set behind him and pulls off a snazzy sleight of hand, we wonder if this is what he means about being a Roulettista: Was DelGaudio an alcoholic, risking his life with booze? Does it matter? The mere suggestion opens certain doors in the minds of those who identify. “I am the Roulettista,” DelGaudio tells the room, and in so doing, he positions the audience to watch everything that follows for clues to his meaning. The cards come up as called, but the technique remains a mystery, other than to say he can deal a card from anywhere in the deck quick enough that our eyes don’t detect the cheat.Ĭompared with Jay and other long-form illusionists, DelGaudio seems less confident onstage, which could simply be a disarming persona - part of the “wolf’s” routine, a con designed to appear innocuous - as he hesitantly opens the show with a story about “the Roulettista,” a man who gambled his life night after night with a loaded revolver. Card tricks are DelGaudio’s specialty, and he shuffles and pretends to show the various ways he can deal a predetermined hand - “pretends” because it’s virtually impossible to learn from this demonstration. In the tradition of master raconteur Ricky Jay (whom he once had the opportunity to assist), DelGaudio is something of a meta magician, transfixing the crowd with stories as he deconstructs the craft. From the moment he appears onstage, DelGaudio is building to the grand finale, in which those labels - “I Am …” a Hipster, a Ninja, a Joker, a Midnight Toker - come back into play, in which the mirror he held up to people on their way in becomes a spotlight of sorts. “Identity is an illusion,” said the board, from which each person was instructed to select a label for the duration of the performance. As they entered the Daryl Roth Theater, audiences were confronted by a wall of cards.
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