The Toronto Fringe (June 30 - July 12) is fast approaching!
James Alan kindly agreed to answer some of our questions ahead of his upcoming show Mysteries and Lies at The Toronto Fringe.
What is your first memory of magic?
How long have you been performing professionally?
My first paid performance was in 2007. I think I started identifying as a professional around 2012.
Why is now the right time for you to be at the Fringe?
At any given time, I have three or four shows I could do. I interact with the audience a lot. So what I do really has to be grounded in the space I’m in. Magic & Martini (2016-2020) always took place in a cocktail lounge. My virtual show, Bring Magic Home, never tried to hide the fact these weird Zoom get-togethers were utterly mad.
The Toronto Fringe is enormous. This year it has one hundred twenty-three shows. And those slots are assigned by lottery. Some years I get busy and don’t get around to applying. But really it was a random number generator that decided this was the time. And so I didn’t know what the show would be until I found out where it was going to be. But once we knew, the whole show basically came together in one afternoon of shuffling index cards around a coffee table.
What is the title of the show?
Mysteries and Lies. I’m chronically obsessed with the paradox of truth in magic — that there is no way to do what we do honestly. My last Fringe foray was called Lies, Damn Lies & Magic Tricks. There’s a naive version of magic which is about fooling people — I know something you don’t know, Nyah! But there’s a more interesting more grown up version which is about getting people to think about what shouldn’t and shouldn’t be possible. But fooling someone is tightly bound up in that project so it’s a very fine line to walk.
I want people to have an amazing — maybe even a profound — experience. But I don’t want to fall into the trap that so many in the industry do of thinking that you need people to think it’s “for real” in order to be respectable. There shouldn't be a contradiction between being totally amazing and being “just a magic trick”.
How, if at all, does this show differ from your previous shows?
Because the theatre is a very intimate space, 46 seats, with raked seating, we decided this was going to be a close-up show — like what you might see at the close-up room of the Magic Castle. The format is one I hadn’t really worked in before 2020. I never really sat down, even to do close-up magic. I got used to it doing virtual shows, where I opted to sit behind a desk. And during re-opening after the pandemic, there was an awkward period in Canada where you weren’t allowed to have more than ten people in a gathering. So my private shows moved from the end of the room to around the coffee table or the dining room table. (Again, so that the magic can be grounded in the environment. The show happens in your living room. I don’t try to make you pretend your living room is a bar or a theatre or a comedy club.)
But it also means this show is really brand new. If you saw Magic & Martini, before the pandemic, this will be completely different.
The show is thematically richer — maybe just because I’m older. Recently truth has been top of mind. We’re bombarded by fake headlines, fake experts, AI slop and the threat a Large Language Model is coming for your job. So as someone who is trying to walk this tightrope of honest lying, my job is to channel all that angst into a real experience, but without making things explicit so you feel like you’re watching a TED talk about what to do if you think your toaster might be conscious.
When did you start writing and preparing for this show?
I found out where the show was going to be in mid January and that’s when I seriously started preparing. The origin of the show we wound up doing is actually a bit stranger.
I did get used to the idea of performing at the table during re-opening. But the first one of those shows was actually in January of 2020. I received a last minute inquiry on a Sunday morning for a show that night. It was for four people. They wanted something to lighten the mood after they got back from a funeral. (Friends of mine know that the stranger the request, the more likely I am to say yes.) So in my mind, that show was Mysteries and Lies v1.0. And there is actually one trick from that which survives into this version.
The other weird thing that seeped into this show is that the theatre is inside of a converted school classroom. It’s one of the old red brick kind built in 1914. So the hallway has that odd proportion designed to funnel hundreds of kids to and from recess. The doors are classroom doors. So we’re playing with the idea that we’re surveying all of the regular school subjects — science, history, math — through the lens of magic.
Will you tease an effect or two for us?
I would rather people be surprised. But if someone is willing to do some work, they can earn a spoiler. When The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, we got so swept up, we forget that immediately after that, there was a magician on, who did two tricks. The show contains one of those. There is also a piece by Tommy Wonder that he was so protective of that he withheld it from publication in The Books of Wonder. (But he later softened and ultimately shared it in 2003.) I’ll be doing a version of that.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with the readers of Canada’s
Magic?
If they have the time, they should take the time to experience the Fringe. There are over a hundred different shows. So part of the fun is making a day of it, and seeing what new and different things you can experience.
Thank you James, for making the time to answer our questions!
