As I write these words, I sit staring at a playing card. The five of hearts, actually. There’s nothing special about it: It’s from a classic pack, with the familiar oil-defying coating and the ornate design on the back featuring two odd winged creatures on what appear to be bicycles. (Never noticed that before.)
And yet this memento of “Nothing to Hide,” a captivating evening of trickery that opened at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Wednesday night, seems to taunt and tease me, mundane though it is. I almost expect it to fly out of my hand and attach itself to the roof, or morph into the queen of spades before my eyes.
This is the aftereffect of watching the brilliant young magicians Helder Guimarães and Derek DelGaudio ply their wondrous trade for an evening. You emerge from their crisp, funny and dumbfounding show questioning how the laws of physics could be so rearranged that playing cards appear to travel through space, escape from locked boxes, arrange themselves in an order preordained weeks in advance and generally behave in ways that can only be called supernatural. All without any indication that Mr. Guimarães and Mr. DelGaudio are manipulating the illusions, although of course their unseen and unfathomable artistry is behind each feat.
“Nothing to Hide,” written by Mr. DelGaudio and directed by the self-professed magic nerd and showbiz polymath Neil Patrick Harris, is a straight-up evening of quietly dazzling magic tricks, performed on a simple set by two affable young men in natty suits who engage in little of the atmospheric hocus-pocus once associated with theatrical sleight of hand. No yanking rabbits out of hats, or sawing shapely ladies in half. It’s just these two young fellows, several decks of ordinary-looking playing cards, and an audience full of goggling eyes and delighted gasps.
Gently mocking the traditions of old-school magic making, Mr. DelGaudio and Mr. Guimarães have the self-deprecating, genial aspect of stand-up comics. (At one point, the slightly roly-polier Mr. DelGaudio describes himself as the “human Bob’s Big Boy” and his partner as a “Portuguese muppet.”) The casual demeanor makes the illusions they perform all the more astounding, as if two guys you met during happy hour at a Midtown bar suddenly started making your Maker’s Mark on the rocks levitate.
Describing just what they do is a bit of a mug’s game, but I’ll give a few morsels in the hopes of whetting the appetite of anyone who’s susceptible to this now rare but durable form of entertainment. In the wordless opening routine, they perform a contest to see who can make a shuffled deck sort itself out by suit, starting with aces and moving through kings. Exchanging wry, “oh yeah, try to top this” glances, each slips out the next card in his chosen suit with a new, confounding flourish.
That’s just a curtain raiser. The more impressive tricks corral the audience into participating, to prove (ha!) that there’s no predetermined scam going on. (Rest assured, by the way, that while “Nothing to Hide” frequently uses us willing suckers as assistants, nobody’s asked to do anything embarrassing.) A stuffed animal tossed around the audience — three times by three random folks, so there’s little chance of a “plant” — determines who will choose from the hundreds of bottles that form the backdrop of the set, each containing a deck of cards. Without divulging more, I’ll just say that somehow a card in one of the chosen bottles emerges with a distinct mark relating to the audience member.
The risk in shows like this is a certain level of awe saturation, but Mr. DelGaudio and Mr. Guimarães are immensely likable company, joshing themselves and the audience with patter that feels spontaneous. And along with Mr. Harris they have shaped the show so that it slowly builds in the ingeniousness of its effects, moving from feats that are mildly mystifying to those that are wholly gob-smacking, as the British say. (American translation: jaw-dropping; I don’t know how to say it in Portuguese, Mr. Guimarães’s native tongue.)
For my money, the biggest head scratcher involves that five of hearts I still have in front of me, mocking the idea that I might catch these two supremely skilled fellows engaging in what I have always assumed to be the standard trick of the trade — deflecting audience attention while a card or deck is substituted for that much-shuffled one. I won’t spoil things by describing how I ended up with the card, or how Mr. Guimarães made it virtually impossible for his partner to know that it was in my possession, or how Mr. DelGaudio then demonstrated that, why yes, he did in fact know that I was holding that five of hearts. I’ll just say that I remain in the dark.
Theater is often said to require the willing suspension of disbelief. Without stating as much, Mr. DelGaudio and Mr. Guimarães challenge you to bring all the disbelief you can muster to their show. And then, with an insouciant air of doing nothing too impressive, they proceed to detonate the armor of cynicism that the most jaded New Yorker could assemble, as easily as if they were blowing those wisps of white flower off a young dandelion.