Indeed, you can watch "Magic Secrets Revealed" several times and still not know what hit you when Ricky Jay begins his act. Last year, I went to see Mr. Jay, perhaps the greatest living sleight-of-hand artist. He knows precisely how to draw the audience in, telling witty stories and performing illusions with the greatest of ease.
In one instance, he has a volunteer write her initials on a card and shuffles it back into a deck but is later unable to locate the marked card. He then has the woman open a new pack of cards, one of which bears her initials. (A burly fellow, Mr. Jay is also wonderfully self- deprecating, as when he mentions the Great Malini, a classic conjurer, who supposedly made his wife appear out of a cup, while Mr. Jay himself, as hard as he has tried, cannot even get married.)
In a 1993 New Yorker essay, author Mark Singer describes a card illusion by Ricky Jay as being done "in a manner so simple, natural and miraculous as to render prestidigitation invisible, thereby raising the strong possibility of divine intervention." It is Mr. Jay's mission, writes Mr. Singer, "to reignite our collective sense of wonder." And this he has done, despite not having held his breath under water for seven minutes.
The key to good magic, explains Frank Casto, is not the trick itself but rather the way it is performed. "Many magicians have a hard time learning this, that you can't just buy the latest trick and wow the audience." It's not easy to get this message across to young magicians, notes Mr. Casto. "When you get into magic . . . you want all the latest toys, and that's not really where it's at. It's really taking one thing and learning to present it in an entertaining way."
Mr. Dallas, meanwhile, is optimistic that magic will make a comeback. One reason is that he has heard all this talk of magic's demise before. One of his colleagues assembled a collection of articles, all of which posed the same question: Is Magic dead? The articles dated back for centuries.
