Grown a bit tired of those magic acts masquerading as full-blown stage shows? The kind with a personable and make-believe-awkward fellow who performs magical feats before an astonished crowd? Who, typically, seems astonished by his own proficiency? And who, at some point in the affair, performs a feat which stubbornly refuses to work, causing him—yes, these magic shows, at least around here, always seem to feature men—to sheepishly accept failure; only to turn round minutes later to reveal that the trick that did not work actually did work, and here’s the proof! To great applause, as he all but overflows with sheepishly astonished modesty of a most excessively false variety.
The Mischief theatre troupe—those folks who have established an international beachhead of belly-laugh farce comedy with The Play That Goes Wrong and similar entertainments—seem to be just as frustrated with those magicians. So much so that Mischief actors/writers/founders Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields have turned their attention, and their poison-tipped (or is it Nerf-tipped?) quills, to an effort they might as well call The Mentalist That Goes Wrong but which is instead titled Mind Mangler, at New World Stages. More officially, Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion. The poster artist, the mind mangler’s own ex-sister-in-law, mistook “tragic” for “magic,” and no wonder.
Enter a grandly hapless nonmaster magician in the person of the beefy Lewis, last seen hereabouts in Peter Pan Goes Wrong where he essayed Nana the dog (decidedly too bulky to slide through the doggie door), doubling as a dastardly pirate who mumbled indecipherably while also twirling about in tights as Peter’s unlikely shadow. Here, Lewis strikes a mystical pose, with coiffed beard, tortoiseshell hornrims, and a silverish medallion around his ample girth; all the while backed by cheesy lights, cheesy music, and enough cheesy smoke effects to smoke the cheese (if you will). “I can hear the thoughts of playing cards,” he intones with grave grandiosity, albeit without a single card trick to test his acumen.
Every such theatrical magician of necessity has a stooge or three hidden in the audience, the better to grease the wheels of illusion and act amazed. In this decidedly low-budget affair, the stooge is co-author Sayers, who milked laughter in Pan as one of Wendy Darling’s brothers, the one in striped pjs who was fed his lines through bulky headphones that inevitably misbehaved. Mr. Shields is not presently in attendance, presumably back in England, tending the various companies of Mischief makers.
If Mind Mangler sounds like it’s going to be just about as delectable as you’d hope, we regret to temper expectations by reporting—as we must—that it all is not quite so funny as it might be, or should be, or we’d like it to be. These magic act entertainments often clock in at a brisk 75 minutes or so. Two acts, over two hours, is too too much. Keep the concessionaires happy, yes; but the Mischief troupe and director Hannah Sharkey haven’t found quite enough magic to mangle. As the first act attempts to build into a climax, Lewis launches into a seemingly endless sequence built around “secrets” contributed by the audience before the show and placed into on-stage fishbowls. What had been 50 or so minutes of general delight turns languorous here; to the great disappointed of this Mischief fan, the grand payoff of the segment is not nearly grand enough, and the comedic inventiveness is dampened in the relatively brief, hit-and-miss second act.
Even so, Mind Mangler provides a fair amount of entertainment; and if you bring the kids, so much the better as it provides them with adult (as opposed to juvenile) entertainment they can howl at and feel quite sophisticated. While this is not a kid’s show, the performance attended had a fair amount of the 6-to-19 set, who were not only altogether delighted but in some cases just about standing on their seats with joy. And you gotta love a show in which they bring out a ouija board and somehow call it a Luigi board.
Let it be added that The Play That Goes Wrong—which you might say is a majestically goofy masterpiece of mischief—transferred from Broadway in 2019 and is still eliciting cascades of laughter upstairs in the New World Stages complex. It’s time for another visit, methinks.
Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion opened November 19, 2023, at New World Stages and runs through March 3, 2024. Tickets and information: mindmanglernyc.com
