Sos and Victoria Petrosyan are performing an extraordinary act. And they’re fast — very fast. They have to be, because time is always working against them.

The art of Quick Change is not new. In the past, rapid costume changes could be surprising and entertaining, but not especially magical. Bulky layers of fabric, one on top of another, made the process of transformation quite apparent to the audience. The Petrosyans have improved on and moved beyond the technology of the past. Their form-fitting costumes and elegant, perfectly timed transformations have brought magic to the art of Quick Change, making it startling and seemingly impossible.

His final trick successfully concluded, the magician strides forward to the edge of the stage. The house is dark and the spotlights are in his eyes, allowing him to see only the first few rows of the audience, but he knows the theater is packed. He smiles into the blackness, raises his arms in the start of a bow, and hears… nothing.

Deafness has been referred to as an “invisible physical disability.” It may not be immediately apparent, but the best estimates state that 8.6 percent of the US population is deaf or hard of hearing, with just under .2 percent being totally deaf in both ears. Quite a few magicians in that segment of the population have made a name for themselves in spite of or because of their lack of hearing.

It’s a bit surprising that Joanie Spina has not been a dancer all her life. In fact, she dropped out from age 11 to 26, a result of “taking the wrong road.” That road took her from her hometown of Woburn (west of Boston) to St. Thomas to Maui to Vegas and, eventually, back to Massachusetts. She was tending bar and had gained 25 pounds. In an effort to drop the weight, she enrolled in a ballet class and a jazz class. As she says, “It was like getting hit with a dart in the forehead.” Feeling a powerful connection at last, she took classes all day long: dance, voice, acting. While she was told that she was too old, she figured she could at least gather knowledge and teach, if not perform. Over the next two years, she danced in a few Boston companies before moving to New York and ultimately answering an ad to be a dancer in a show with “an international stage and television star.”

Joanie went on to work as a principal performer, choreographer, and artistic co-director for David Copperfield over the next eleven years. Her work included choreographing ten of David’s annual CBS specials and his Broadway show, Dreams and Nightmares. She followed this up by building her own act, which played in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and the Bahamas.
After retiring from performing in 2000, Joanie pursued directing fulltime. Her list of clients is staggering: Kalin & Jinger, Princess Tenko, Marco Tempest, Circo Tihany, Tim Kole, Melinda, Jeff Hobson, Juliana Chen, The Spencers, Dirk Arthur, and Lawrence & Priscilla. She lives in Las Vegas but continues to travel the world, staging and directing shows, as well as pursuing her latest passion, filmmaking.

STAN ALLEN sat down with Joanie to discuss her roles as assistant, dancer, choreographer, director, and documentary filmmaker.

Walter Blaney is the kind of guy you like the moment you meet him. The fact that he’s funny is, of course, a plus, but it isn’t an overwhelming aspect of his persona; more importantly, he is humble, polite, warm, intelligent, gentle, and genuine. He clearly loves and respects magic, and magicians feel the same way about him. He’s also the sort of fellow who will pull out a vanishing birdcage in an elevator full of strangers. Why? Just because it’s fun — and perhaps to pass out a business card or two.

Walter’s adoration for all kinds of entertainment goes back to the first time he saw a marionette show, when he was six years old. Two years later, he was exhibiting his own apple-box marionette stage and handmade figures at the Texas Centennial World’s Fair in Dallas, winning third place in a contest. The year after that, Blackstone the Great appeared at the Majestic Theater in Dallas with his Show of 1001 Wonders! Walter saw every show, four times a day, for the entire week. “Bingo!” he says with enthusiasm, “I cut the marionette strings and, from that moment on, I became a magician. I figured I’d wasted the first nine years of my life!”

At 10 a.m. on May 31, 2008, Eric DeCamps, champion magician, answered the call of Science. That morning, he was part of the first World Science Festival at the New York University in Manhattan. Dr. Eric Haseltine, a neuroscientist whose work has included being the head of Disney’s “Imagineering” division, had proposed a program titled Brain Tricks for the Festival. This presentation would highlight some of the fascinating ways the mind-brain combination, in conjunction with the senses, fools us. And that’s where DeCamps came in.

This month, read about the return of the Masked Magician, the bright career ahead for Justin Kredible, Pixar animation’s new animated short with a magical bent, and the upcoming Erdnase musical! You’ll also learn about Ricky Jay’s return to the theater with 52 Assistants, find out who won the Celebracadabra competition, as well as gain the inside information on magic coming up on television and on the silver screen.

Fifteen products are covered this month by  Michael Claxton, Peter Duffie, Jason England, Brad Henderson, and David Kaye.

• Revelation by Dai Vernon and S.W. Erdnase
• A Tribute to the Card Tricks of Stewart Judah by Ryan Swigert
• Kiddin’ Around with Chris Capehart
• 10 Below Zero DVD by Andrew Normansell
• Perfection DVD by Oz Pearlman
• New Aerial Glass Suspension by Will Golden
• Has This Ever Happened to You? A Collection of Magicians’ Faux Pas compiled by    Celeste Evans
• Flipped Out DVD by Craig Petty
• Fade by Titanas DVD
• Casanova Concept by Steve Haynes DVD
• Wipe the Slate Clean by Chris Webb
• Bone Saw by Michelangelo
• The Omega Mutation with Cameron Francis
• Cointwo by Homer Liwag
• Master Deck Book by Marc Oberon

Talk About Tricks boasts the first move phenom-cardician Dave Buck’s ever devised. Shockingly, it’s a coin move! This issue also explores in great depth three ways of locating four of a kind from a genuinely shuffled pack, and ends with a beautiful but challenging routine wherein an entire deck appears repeatedly where the audience least expects it.

When you are starting from scratch to create a routine for a trick you have to ask yourself what kind of routine will it be. Silent to music? Descriptive patter? Description plus comedy? There is also the storytelling method. Here you tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end. This month, David Kaye shares Krystyn Lambert’s storytelling routine for the Beads of Prussia. It is a charming story about a princess and a necklace.

Anthony’s offering for his final column has a very appealing presentation: you can look at a spectator and predict exactly which answers they’ll give in a personality quiz. That isn’t exactly what occurs in this effect, but it is the impression with which the audience will be left. It involves some gaffed pages that you insert into a magazine, but the MAGIC magazine team has kindly done all the really hard work for you by providing in this issue of MAGIC everything you need to make those gaffed pages.

So far, Bob has elucidated four shadows of magic, four approaches through which magicians help us see the dark — the physical, supernatural, moral, and psychological. In this concluding installment, he discusses the fifth shadow and makes some final observations about our magical dance with death.

Dear Show Doctor: “I am a bit conflicted. I consider myself to be an honest person. Lying is not something that comes naturally to me; in fact, it makes me very uncomfortable. It seems that every time I start to perform magic for my family or friends, there is something about me that telegraphs that I’m doing something tricky. Sometimes, at the end of an effect, my friends say I look guilty. Is there a way to do magic without having to lie, or how can I stop feeling guilty about it?”

As a magician and not merely an actor playing one, it is our mission and our burden to create impossibilities — that sense of “No way!” There are, of course, many shades and intensities to that experience, and it is wise to choose different shades to create a textured show. But there have to be substantial dollops of “No way!” or we are missing the most that magic has to offer.