The Campus Inn Theatre was filled to the brim last weekend with students, parents, siblings, and friends who were fortunate enough to be apart of a mystical and family-friendly evening Virtual magic show  that went on for close to two hours Sunday night. With performers ranging from young award-winning magician to veterans from the famed Magic Castle Clubhouse in Hollywood.

The night was packed tight with one mind-boggling and logic-bending performance after another, but began with an introduction by the youthful John Ricardo, a self-proclaimed friend of other magicians at the Magic Castle. Mr. Ricardo entertained the audience with his humor and astounding card tricks, successfully eliciting both laughter and gasps from those in the crowd whilst promising even more extraordinary acts to come. After his seemingly brief work onstage, he introduced one of his colleagues, Jeff Black, 23, and a former Magic Castle magician, who kept the comedy and magic alive with his incorporation of dancing, attempts to toss and catch cards behind his back, and his silky smooth blindfold. Black even asked a few of the younger audience members to come on stage and help him out with a few of his tricks; to one of the volunteers he even offered a gift. After the man walked offstage back to his seat, Black produced a long piece of cloth from his pocket and from under it revealed a bottle of apple cider which he handed to the man. However his most intriguing trick was when he managed to seemingly remove three playing cards from a sealed deck of cards, which before he even began to perform he had given to a member of the audience.

Immediately after Black’s exit offstage, the audience was treated with a momentary return of Mr. Ricardo as he introduced the next act, Thomas Morgenroth, another young magician who offered a large amount of energy to the rest of the nights performances. Ricardo and Morgenroth remained onstage together to perform as a duo; they alternated picking audience members and guessing the cards each respectively chose and attempted to compete against one another at guessing the word an older-gentleman had picked out of a bag. The latter trick was one of the more memorable of the night, after both Ricardo and Morgenroth were finished writing on a piece of glass the word they believed the man to have chosen, they revealed their answers to the audience: their two words separate were gibberish, but when placed behind one another spelled out the man’s word with ease.

The bantering back and forth by Ricardo and Morgenroth, who were obviously good friends, made the performances almost painfully, however delightful, humorous. As each performed one of their acts, the other would give a snide comment to the audience behind the others back. In one instance, as Morgenroth struggled onstage to telepathically guess the birthdays of three audience members, Ricardo, sitting in a chair behind his partner, asked one of the volunteers to just tell him what her birthday was out of exasperation. The lady hesitated, and Ricardo leaned forward with Morgenroth still guessing, saying, “You can tell me, all my tricks have succeeded. I’m real!” The duos performance onstage was easily one of the highlights of the show, yet two final performers who had no trouble following up and finishing the night with a distinctly high level of amazement followed their act.

David Gabbay, one of the more notable and famous magicians in attendance, as well as a current member of the Magic Castle and first place award winning magician in-terms of close-up magic was the second to last act to walk onstage. Whether it was the ridiculously large sized playing cards he brought onstage to offer a handicap to the audience so they could follow his tricks better, yet still managed to fool every person; his ability to dumbfound the audience by tying two pieces of string together while the ends sat outside of a “magic” box. His stupendous act of tearing off the serial number part of a dollar bill and handing it to a child volunteer, then proceeding to make the rest of the bill, a lemon, egg, and walnut disappear as well; and then walking back over to his “magic” box, revealed the lemon, which he cut open to reveal the egg, which he smashed to reveal the walnut, which he cracked to reveal the dollar bill—the same dollar bill when compared to the serial number on the piece still in the child’s pocket. However, the veteran magician left the audience speechless and wide-eyed when he swallowed over a dozen needles and a long string of dental floss nonchalantly, only to regurgitate it back up, pulling it out of his mouth so that every needle was hanging perfectly from its loop on the dental floss.

After Gabbay the final act walked onstage after being announced by Mr. Ricardo as the youth champion magician in Japan, Sho Mikami. With his thick Japanese accent and seemingly simplistic use of various props such as a flipbook, restaurant menu, and iPad, Mikami wowed the audience into applause act after act. He explained that he kept a “future” journal, asking for a volunteer and flipping through his flipbook which had writing on it that somehow told the future about exactly what the volunteer would do or say. Mikami’s most noteworthy trick however, was when he somehow sent a deck of cards to the past, which he demonstrated by placing the deck on the table and then picking it up to reveal each card as blank, explaining that the cards were not printed so far into the past; he then sent the cards into the future, showing the change on his iPad, and pulling out the cards to show them as torn and stained with age.

As Mikami completed his final act, the rest of the magicians joined their colleague onstage and thanked the audience, as well as for a standing ovation by the audience. The group prepared for the night’s performances at the Campus Inn was not only irrevocably talented, each was a skilled performer that kept the audience engaged in the magical, as well as humorous and enthusiastic interactions they had with one another and audience.