“And one cheats oneself as a human being if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly…. Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of ‘character.’”
—“Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag
Flash, woah-oh, oh
Together we can ride on the universe.
—“Flash,” by The Ehrlich Brothers, from the album Flash
Many contemporary magic shows feel like they are being presented by a lawyer in a courthouse: Magicians spend so much time talking about the cards they are not touching, the box they haven’t been near, the sleeves that are rolled up, and the people they have “never met before tonight” that you can’t help but ask, “What is happening?” And also, “Can you please just do some magic?” Magic has gained great technical and artistic sophistication in the last decades, but sometimes—it seems—at the expense of fun.
Additionally, there is a certain populist spirit that has been lost as magic continues to float away from the large touring family shows that were once the primary expression of the art and toward something more refined—yes—but also exclusive, minimal, and rationalistic.
I wanted to see what it looks like when magic is presented in the old, spectacular way. The kind of magic that requires not a briefcase, but a caravan.
For this reason, I convinced a handful of the most opinionated magicians I know to meet at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and witness an extravaganza of pure magical output presented by The Ehrlich Brothers. My hope was that there would be no verification of signatures, no reading of body language, no failure effects or matching corners, and no numbers flipped upside down to reveal letters. No outs either. I wanted to see the most joyous and ridiculous magic show possible and was not disappointed.
My other hope was that seeing magic scaled up in size might illuminate other areas of the art. My hunch was that seeing magical effects in this gigantic context could provide useful lessons for performers of all kinds.
Andreas and Chris Ehrlich—two brothers from Herford, Germany, who have spent the past 10 years performing in Europe with a stadium illusion show of unprecedented spectacle and ambition—recently toured the United States with a scaled-down show called Diamonds: The Mind-Blowing Magic Show. This “smaller” show required a traveling crew of only 35 (rather than the usual 100) and six trucks (instead of their usual 30), one of which was filled entirely with candy.