Penn & Teller talk about working with Mischief Theatre on hit show Magic Goes Wrong.
Legendary magicians Penn & Teller have been sawing the magic rulebook in half since the mid-1970s.
Presenting shows that combine bamboozling illusions and dark comedy with magic that often seems to go horribly wrong, they are notorious for revealing to the audience exactly how their tricks are done - a habit which has long prevented them from being members of the Magic Circle. Not that they mind. In fact, they revel in the illusion of chaos.
So when they announced in 2019 that they were getting together with Mischief Theatre - the team behind smash-hit shows The Play That Goes Wrong, Peter Pan Goes Wrong and The Comedy About A Bank Robbery, as well as BBC One TV series The Goes Wrong Show - it seemed like a perfect match.
The result of the collaboration - Magic Goes Wrong - opened in the West End to rave reviews and is now casting its spell on audiences across the UK.
The team-up with Mischief came about when Penn & Teller were performing in London, and Penn Jillette’s family decided they wanted to see a show in the West End...
“I don't go to comedy theatre at all,” says Penn. “I like theatre to be deadly dull, slow and depressing. But my wife and children picked The Play That Goes Wrong. I realised that not only was my family laughing harder than I've ever seen them, but I was too!”
He immediately told Teller (that one word is now the magician’s legal name) to book a ticket.
Despite being known for his onstage silence, it was Teller who started discussions with Mischief’s artistic directors, Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields and Henry Lewis.
“I’m more shy than Teller, so it never crossed my mind to go backstage,” says Penn, “but Teller took himself backstage and said, ‘Hey, I'm a star!’”
Teller insists it wasn’t quite like that: “As I was sitting in my seat, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You're Teller, aren't you? The cast wants to give you free ice cream’. So afterwards I went backstage to thank the cast and compliment them, because it really was one of the finest shows I've ever seen.”
A few months later, the two magicians and all three of Mischief’s artistic directors were eating homemade pancakes at Teller’s Las Vegas house and plotting a brand-new show.
Working on a stage production with unfamiliar people was a new experience for Penn & Teller, who rarely collaborate with anyone else.
“Teller and I have a dynamic that we’ve built over 47 years, so this was a huge leap of faith,” says Penn.
“We couldn’t go out to dinner with these guys, we had to jump straight into bed. We were told: they are going to be here at 10am on Wednesday and you'll start writing your show. You won't even know which one is Jonathan and which ones are Henry. But it took only about 20 minutes before I felt like I was around my closest friends.”
Shields, Sayer and Lewis spent a week and a half putting together the bones of the show in a small side room off the stage of The Rio hotel, where Penn & Teller are the longest-running headline act in Vegas history.
“There was one moment when Henry (Lewis) and Jonathan said, ‘It could kind of go like this’,” Penn explains. “And then the two of them did a five-minute improvisation. Now, I have sat in a room with Lou Reed playing Sweet Jane four feet from me. I've talked to Richard Feynman about physics. I've spoken to Bob Dylan. But I said, ‘This is a moment I will bookmark for the rest of my life’. I felt like I was watching the Pythons at their peak, and I thought, ‘This is why I'm in showbiz: to be this near to that level of talent and skill’. And when I'm on my deathbed listing the 100 artistic events of my life, that moment will be there.”
After a few more sessions, the show had come together. But, by adding the trademark Goes Wrong approach, all the tricks in the production had to work on not just one level but two: there had to be the trick that goes wrong, and then the trick that actually dazzles the audience.
So how did they devise the illusions?
“You get an idea, which is usually quite a grand one,” explains Teller, “and then you find that it's impossible, so you revise it over and over again until it works.
“There's a trick in the show where one of the cast members gets accidentally sawed in half by a buzzsaw. That was more than a year of work. Part of the trick involves blood, but if you just show the blood on stage, it looks boring; it has no impact at all. So a big part of the buzzsaw trick for us was developing it in such a way that when the blood came, it would be sprayed up against a huge backdrop where you could truly enjoy the bright red colour.”
Speaking of blood and buzzsaws, Magic Goes Wrong - which takes the form of a disastrous fundraising benefit - is definitely more comically gory than Mischief’s previous work. Was that Penn & Teller’s influence?
“I'm afraid it might have something to do with us,” Teller admits. “We think that gore is essentially funny.
It's really hard to pull off serious gore in the theatre because people tend to want to laugh. They know that it's fake, but they see that it looks real. And that's very much like a magic trick.”
Despite the fact that Penn & Teller have built their career on making it look like everything is going horrifically wrong, the magicians insist that mishaps are incredibly rare in real life. “While we're rehearsing we might get a minor cut or bruise,” Teller says, “but we don't ever allow the possibility of something going seriously wrong. If we did, we wouldn't have been working successfully for 47 years.”
Penn & Teller talk about working with Mischief Theatre on hit show Magic Goes Wrong.
Legendary magicians Penn & Teller have been sawing the magic rulebook in half since the mid-1970s.
Presenting shows that combine bamboozling illusions and dark comedy with magic that often seems to go horribly wrong, they are notorious for revealing to the audience exactly how their tricks are done - a habit which has long prevented them from being members of the Magic Circle. Not that they mind. In fact, they revel in the illusion of chaos.
So when they announced in 2019 that they were getting together with Mischief Theatre - the team behind smash-hit shows The Play That Goes Wrong, Peter Pan Goes Wrong and The Comedy About A Bank Robbery, as well as BBC One TV series The Goes Wrong Show - it seemed like a perfect match.
The result of the collaboration - Magic Goes Wrong - opened in the West End to rave reviews and is now casting its spell on audiences across the UK.
The team-up with Mischief came about when Penn & Teller were performing in London, and Penn Jillette’s family decided they wanted to see a show in the West End...
“I don't go to comedy theatre at all,” says Penn. “I like theatre to be deadly dull, slow and depressing. But my wife and children picked The Play That Goes Wrong. I realised that not only was my family laughing harder than I've ever seen them, but I was too!”
He immediately told Teller (that one word is now the magician’s legal name) to book a ticket.
Despite being known for his onstage silence, it was Teller who started discussions with Mischief’s artistic directors, Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields and Henry Lewis.
“I’m more shy than Teller, so it never crossed my mind to go backstage,” says Penn, “but Teller took himself backstage and said, ‘Hey, I'm a star!’”
Teller insists it wasn’t quite like that: “As I was sitting in my seat, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You're Teller, aren't you? The cast wants to give you free ice cream’. So afterwards I went backstage to thank the cast and compliment them, because it really was one of the finest shows I've ever seen.”
A few months later, the two magicians and all three of Mischief’s artistic directors were eating homemade pancakes at Teller’s Las Vegas house and plotting a brand-new show.
Working on a stage production with unfamiliar people was a new experience for Penn & Teller, who rarely collaborate with anyone else.
“Teller and I have a dynamic that we’ve built over 47 years, so this was a huge leap of faith,” says Penn.
“We couldn’t go out to dinner with these guys, we had to jump straight into bed. We were told: they are going to be here at 10am on Wednesday and you'll start writing your show. You won't even know which one is Jonathan and which ones are Henry. But it took only about 20 minutes before I felt like I was around my closest friends.”
Shields, Sayer and Lewis spent a week and a half putting together the bones of the show in a small side room off the stage of The Rio hotel, where Penn & Teller are the longest-running headline act in Vegas history.
“There was one moment when Henry (Lewis) and Jonathan said, ‘It could kind of go like this’,” Penn explains. “And then the two of them did a five-minute improvisation. Now, I have sat in a room with Lou Reed playing Sweet Jane four feet from me. I've talked to Richard Feynman about physics. I've spoken to Bob Dylan. But I said, ‘This is a moment I will bookmark for the rest of my life’. I felt like I was watching the Pythons at their peak, and I thought, ‘This is why I'm in showbiz: to be this near to that level of talent and skill’. And when I'm on my deathbed listing the 100 artistic events of my life, that moment will be there.”
After a few more sessions, the show had come together. But, by adding the trademark Goes Wrong approach, all the tricks in the production had to work on not just one level but two: there had to be the trick that goes wrong, and then the trick that actually dazzles the audience.
So how did they devise the illusions?
“You get an idea, which is usually quite a grand one,” explains Teller, “and then you find that it's impossible, so you revise it over and over again until it works.
“There's a trick in the show where one of the cast members gets accidentally sawed in half by a buzzsaw. That was more than a year of work. Part of the trick involves blood, but if you just show the blood on stage, it looks boring; it has no impact at all. So a big part of the buzzsaw trick for us was developing it in such a way that when the blood came, it would be sprayed up against a huge backdrop where you could truly enjoy the bright red colour.”
Speaking of blood and buzzsaws, Magic Goes Wrong - which takes the form of a disastrous fundraising benefit - is definitely more comically gory than Mischief’s previous work. Was that Penn & Teller’s influence?
“I'm afraid it might have something to do with us,” Teller admits. “We think that gore is essentially funny.
It's really hard to pull off serious gore in the theatre because people tend to want to laugh. They know that it's fake, but they see that it looks real. And that's very much like a magic trick.”
Despite the fact that Penn & Teller have built their career on making it look like everything is going horrifically wrong, the magicians insist that mishaps are incredibly rare in real life. “While we're rehearsing we might get a minor cut or bruise,” Teller says, “but we don't ever allow the possibility of something going seriously wrong. If we did, we wouldn't have been working successfully for 47 years.”