It was a smart idea to get Penn and Teller, the offbeat Las Vegas illusionists, to host a three-part series on street magic in India, Egypt and China.
Smart because who better to appraise the talent of performers than other professionals?
Smart because Penn and Teller -- no one seems to know what their first names are -- actually started out as street magicians.
Smart because, despite the Vegas glitz, their own act has the same basic low-tech ingredients -- decks of cards, balls and cups -- as you'll find in the back alleys of Cairo, New Delhi and Beijing.
And smart because, unlike someone like David Copperfield, these guys actually have personalities.
At least Penn, the tall one, does, and he's as quick with his wit as with his hands. (In Cairo, a street merchant offers to sell him some papyrus: "No, thanks," he says. "I have a computer now.")
Teller, who looks and behaves like a saner incarnation of Harpo Marx, never speaks on-stage. But he mugs well, and even speaks on camera in the Egypt episode, usually with cogency.
Produced by Toronto's Ric Esther Bienstock (a Gemini Award-winner for Ebola: Inside an Outbreak) for Yorkshire Associated Producers, the series, Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour, is one part documentary, one part road movie and one part just fun.
It also has a fish-out-of-water dimension: Two very strange Americans, one absurdly tall and ponytailed, the other short and puckish, neither of them particularly well-travelled or cosmopolitan, who wear suits and ties in the Egyptian desert, and have their entire consignment of food and beverages shipped from Canada (two weeks' worth of such things as canned tuna and pears, in each city, for them and their two handlers) lest wayward microbes imperil their duodenal tracts or their Vegas commitments. (The paranoia wasn't completely without cause; a friend who had visited India contracted some insidious bacteria and promptly died -- a major blow to his career.) Ironically, in India, the one country where stomach problems are most likely to occur, they grew tired of their own menu and ate in restaurants.
In the business for 25 years, Penn and Teller have seen or dissected more illusions than you can shake a wand at. But according to Bienstock, who directed the China episode, they saw a trick in a Beijing teahouse that they considered one of the greatest acts they'd ever seen -- a performer changing the mask on his face 10 times at such lightning speed that it appears seamless (in the film, the sequence is thankfully shown in slow-motion).
Of course, thanks to Mao's Cultural Revolution, an entire generation of magicians was whisked off the streets of China and sent away for more orthodox education. But lately, the art of magic has started to make a modest comeback. Indeed, in one locale, there's even a state-run, year-long magic course offered in conjunction with acrobatic training. In the countryside, farmers with time to kill during the winter practice the old illusions, struggling to keep tradition alive. Few of them had ever heard of Penn and Teller. When Penn asks one of them to name his favourite Western magician, the answer, in heavily accented English, is "David Copperfield." Turning to the camera, Penn quips, "that's Penn and Teller in Chinese."
Although the basic premise (Penn and Teller find magic abroad) is essentially the same, each episode has its own character.
In Minya, south of Cairo on the Nile, a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, Penn and Teller travelled under armed guard. They were there to check out some 4,000-year-old tomb hieroglyphs that seemed to show ancient Egyptians performing the ball-and-cup trick. The verdict was inconclusive, but the episode does give us Penn and Teller's version of the trick, all the more remarkable for being done with see-through plastic cups. Even the security guards were impressed.
In India, there's a quest to find the legendary Indian rope trick. What they find instead is a form of street magic not for the faint of heart -- bloody illusions that simulate the severing of tongues and necks. (To restore the appendages, the magicians ask the audience to throw rupees into the hat.)
In China, Bienstock et al. found themselves shooting in bitter winter cold and, despite the presence of a translator, under difficult language constraints. Away from her family (husband Richard Mortimer, producer of CBC-TV's Jonovision, and their two young children) for five weeks, "I was whining the entire time," says Bienstock. Nor did it help that Penn and Teller had a traffic accident one day; a hay truck smashed into their bus. Penn's shoulder went through a window. "That was a little scary," she concedes. "But they were real troopers, and the shoot continued."
Bienstock, 41, whose work includes recent documentaries on boxing and the porn industry, won't disclose what the budget was, which likely means it was well beyond what most documentaries cost. But she did discover that "it's hard to shoot magic, because some of the illusions are long, and you have to shoot enough to keep the integrity of the trick but also compress it."
There were off-screen challenges as well. Because Penn and Teller come with a certain aura of celebrity, Bienstock wanted to make their two weeks "in country" as comfortable as possible, with first-class accommodation. No sweat in major cities, but difficult in the Chinese countryside. However, after some legwork, her researcher (Felix Golubev) found a suitable hotel.
"So we went early to check it out, and it was fine," Bienstock recalled over lunch last week. "The rooms were brand new. So then we come back there with Penn and Teller after the shoot -- the crew, etc. -- and it's a brothel. There was a prostitution ring working out of the basement, servicing the community. As soon as you got into your hotel room, the phone rings and you're offered the service. So the phones are always ringing and Teller, an insomniac, is a very light sleeper. But I didn't want to disconnect the phones, because we needed to be able to contact them."
In the end, Bienstock silenced the calls with an offer that usually works in any language: hard cash. The three-part Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour begins tonight on CBC-TV at 9.