Review: Derek Hughes has a magical touch with his audience at The Magic Parlour

Magic is enjoying quite the renaissance in Chicago. Alongside the city’s existing emporia aplenty, “The Hand & The Eye,” a plush and huge multi-stage venue in the former Lowry’s Prime Rib building at 100 E. Ontario St., newly styled as both a magic theater and a private club, is expected to announce its opening plans next week for this spring.

Meanwhile, downtown, the great solo Chicago magician Dennis Watkins is continuing to operate his intimate basement Loop venue, The Magic Parlour. Watkins takes occasional breaks from the stage and curates a series of guests; his current visitor, a performer from Minnesota who bills himself as a “stand-up magician,” is well worth seeing.

Derek Hughes is one of Eugene Burger’s former students. The late guru, who lived quietly on Dearborn Street in Chicago, had little public profile but a slew of devotees like Hughes, who credited him with refining their acts and would journey to Chicago to sit at his knee — metaphorically, at least.

I met Burger once (he was in failing health) and he was, indeed, an inspiring teacher whose former students tend to incorporate a lot of personal storytelling into their acts, reflecting Burger’s mantra that while there are only so many magic tricks in the repertoire they can be framed and reframed in a million different ways, just as long as the magician focuses on his or her relationship with the audience and is willing to be vulnerable and honest, as paradoxical as that may sound. Actors long have been taught the importance of emotional engagement with an audience; Burger argued it was imperative that good magicians learned the same. Over time, reviewing magic, you come to see who did and did not listen.

Hughes is a stand-up example of one who did. Regular magic devotees such as myself will have seen all of his tricks before, in the raw sense, but his show is highly engaging nonetheless because of his ability to live in the moment and react in a live way to what is going on in the room. That’s the key to this kind of interactive, will-you-please-join-me-on-stage magic and, for me at least, how the magician interacts with these volunteers, invariably a cross-section of the public and often feeling some anxiety as they approach, is always more interesting than the tricks themselves.

Time and again, when I saw his show on Sunday, the slightly off-beat Hughes not only put people at ease but involved them in his unfolding narrative. Magicians have an innate understanding of the importance of misdirection, of course, and Burger’s former students tend to focus on trying to get an audience to embrace his signature argument that “life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.”

That’s a vital metamorphosis of the art in an age where the secret to every trick can be discerned with a few clicks toward the right TikToks with weasel-like dudes grinning as they take down yet another brick in the wall of necessary human aspiration.

But their import, not that they ever had anyone, was batted away for 75 minutes by the self-described former “theater kid” as he weaved his way through card tricks and mentalisms, all deftly performed and superbly executed with disarmingly modest wit to boot.

Unsurprisingly, the best stuff involved Hughes’ interactions with the several 12- or 13-year-olds who were there with family members celebrating their birthdays. Collectively, they offered a picture of surprise, delight and, because Hughes is that kind of magician, they all went back to their seats empowered, at least when it came to the magical but ever-necessary arts of relative thinking and the pros and cons of a life lived with belief.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic

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If you go

Derek Hughes performs through March 15 at The Magic Parlor, 50 W. Randolph St.; tickets $76-$106 at 312-443-3800 and www.themagicparlourchicago.com