El Mago Pop Broadway Reviews

Díaz’s best routine was performed alone to a peppy Jacques Brel song. Breathlessly, Díaz manipulated a ball (a tribute to Cardini’s classic billiard ball routine), many cards, even his own right shoe. His hands would be empty. His mouth would be empty. You would swear to it on any available Bible. Then they would be full, cards raining to the floor. He sent a few cards whizzing through the air in a way that reminded me of Ricky Jay, the scholar and magician, who died in 2018. I may have teared up a little. This was Díaz’s simplest sequence and also his most beautiful. Who needs a helicopter when you can make magic like that?

If you can catch El Mago Pop during its too-brief run, you will be well entertained. Between his more spectacular setpieces, the winsome Diáz—a compact cutie who is billed as Spain’s top-selling artist of the past five years—proves his bona fides with dextrous ventures into card and ball manipulation. (Time-filling video sequences depict him in comic-book graphics, like a modern-day superhero.) A few of the tricks will be familiar to magic fans, but Diáz puta clever spins on some of the more familiar routines: a standard torn-newspaper bit is subsumed into a larger sequence that takes you aback, and a moment of quasi-levitation is berthed in elegant shadow play. Broadway hasn’t hosted a magic show since before the pandemic shutdown, and it’s good to have some illusions again. For 75 delightful minutes, you may feel a little transported yourself.

Díaz’s skills as an illusionist are faultless, but the show feels off-kilter as a piece of theater. Díaz feels impressively in charge of his tricks, but not the show as a show. His audience interactions feel stilted and off. One little boy who was shepherded up on stage was lightly (not unpleasantly, but oddly) joshed with. Another amazing illusion required the participation of a female specifically, Díaz said. But, having watched the illusion (which really does have you rubbing your eyes in disbelief), this audience member was left thinking: that could have been a male. Why a female specifically?

Therefore, the question instantly becomes: How successful is 37-year-old Antonio Díaz, who describes himself as a life-long David Copperfield devotee? The short answer is: He’s very successful. The longer answer is that, doing any number of card tricks (more about them later), his long suit is a boyish charm combined with an ostensible love for the illusions he creates. He also shows off a quick ad-lib wit, even more admirable in a fellow who says he’s only recently become comfortable speaking English.

The irony of the show’s self-aggrandizement is that much of Diaz’s appeal lies in his down-to-earth informality. Speaking in a heavily-accented English, he delivers no over-the-top patter; he doesn’t introduce any of his effects as being, say, the most death-defying attempt to overcome the laws of physics in human history. He dons no top hat or cape. He wears a t-shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers – one of which he keeps on losing. Indeed, that is among the most disarming of his tricks. He keeps on retrieving the sneaker in the oddest of places, like the bottom of a tank of water — at which point we realize the sneaker had somehow disappeared from his foot yet again while we weren’t looking.

His heart, though, is in the large-scale illusions, including one in which he suddenly makes a helicopter appear onstage (someone should have told him that Miss Saigon beat him to the punch decades ago). He does some impressive aerial work with wires, flying around the stage as if auditioning for the next Peter Pan revival (he’s certainly got the boyish charm for it). But his principal trick, one which he performs in several variations, is to have one or more people, including himself, appear one moment in a large transparent cube and then suddenly reappear in another one across the stage. It’s a spectacular illusion, but one that wears thin with repetition.

Anyone who’s ever watched “America’s Got Talent” and wondered what the grand prize winner’s show might look like can now skip the flight to Las Vegas. Well, that’s if they can get to Broadway in the next seven days and see the extraordinary spectacle being offered by Spanish illusionist Antonio Diaz in “El Mago Pop,” now at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Without question, the 75-minute show (at my performance) is both visually and intellectually dazzling – and, luckily, proves quite entertaining for audiences of all ages and nationalities.

Díaz, jadedness be damned, accomplishes the same thing. Though the illusions will not be new to anyone familiar with Vegas-style magicians like David Copperfield or the sleazier Criss Angel – objects, and audience members, disappear and reappear onstage; numbers are incredibly divined without logical explanation; the man himself flies, waving off apparent wires – what separates Díaz from their sexed-up style of audience domination is his ability to forge a successful narrative and thematic connection to his still-there innocence and lifelong fascination with physics and possibility.