PHOTO CREDIT: Shane O’Neal
“It was hard at first, as I can do a joke, and I can do a trick but making the trick funny isn’t as easy as it looks. So, you really have to figure out how to make the actual routine funny. With magic, it’s whole body, and comedy is the intricate part that hold it all together. Once you understand the formula, it becomes much easier!”
Maintaining a balance of amusement and amazement with legerdemain and laughter makes for the challenge of Murray the Magician, aka Murray SawChuck. He brings his combination of shtick and prestidigitation to Potawatomi Hotel & Casino’s Northern Lights Theater on Saturday Aug. 24 for 7 and 9 p.m. shows. His career path had a young start, but it took encouragement from a peer to make him the complete package of comedy and magic he is today.
“Magic caught my attention first,” SawChuck says of his youthful fascination, encouraged by the gift of a kit of tricks given him by an uncle and aunt. “Seeing other magicians on TV at the time inspired me, and I thought it was really cool, as I knew they didn’t have a special power; but I did appreciate the special skill set needed to be either ahead or behind the audience’s thought pattern to achieve a special effect called magic.
“In my mid-twenties,” he continues, “another act said to me, ‘You’re funny! You need to add comedy to you magic.’ I said, ‘I am a magician. not a comedian.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you just be an entertainer!’ That was it. I said, ‘You’re right,’ and started figuring out ways to put comedy into all my magic bits.”
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That doubling of his own skill set brought twice as much immediate gratification. “With comedy, you can’t beat when an audience laughs over clapping,” he says. “Clapping you can do whether you like something or not. But laughing is instinctual; if it’s not funny, you’re not going to laugh!"
A Native Canadian, SawChuck elicited both claps and laughs throughout the U.S. during his stint on the 2010 season of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent.” The exposure gave both his career and his cellphone a boost. "When I did AGT, it was the fifth season, so we had the highest-viewed season ever with 22 million viewers. That year as a game changer for me, having that many people at once see you on a national TV show. And this is when Instagram, YouTube and Twitter weren’t as big as they are now, so it was an unreal experience, everyone knowing who you were overnight. When I performed my trick in the finals where I turned a girl into a tiger, the incoming text messages and Facebook messages had my phone dinging for about three hours straight. I’d never seen anything like that in my life and probably won’t see that again.”
That tiger trick is a mindblower. SawChuck won’t, however, be bringing any critters in tow when he comes from his adopted home of Las Vegas to the Northern Lights. “Working with animals like the tigers and bears I have used it’s a lot of work and patience, as they work when they want to work. If they do not want to work or co-operate, guest what. You wait for them. The effect and amazement seeing a beautiful animal on stage and up close is breathtaking, but now I prefer to see them in the wild running around and enjoying their lives!”
He will bring plenty else to make for an entertaining evening, though. First there’s Lefty, whom SawChuck describes as “my comical sidekick who is my stagehand-guest act. He’s a world class magician who is just brilliant!” And there’s the versatility Murray the Magician has developed over the years. “I am like a five-piece rock band; we can play a postage stamp bar like the Whisky Go Go in Los Angeles or a 10,000-seat arena, with video projection and the sound system.”
His venue this time in Milwaukee holds a particular fondness for him for its intimacy. “People will get to see what I do up close and personal. You can’t beat being that close to the comedy and magic!”
From his “America’s Got Talent” stint, here Murray pays tribute to his father's railroad career by making an entire train car vanish:
