Duo cut from different cloth

Penn & Teller perform their magic act at daily at the MGM Grand through Wednesday.

MIKE WEATHERFORD
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For a reviewer, seeing Penn & Teller is like taking a vacation from the other Las Vegas shows -- especially the more generic magic revues that rely on people dancing around giant puzzle boxes.

The other acts hop-skip like ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov with mimelike routines that stay on the safe side of the language barrier. But Penn & Teller -- or at least Penn, the only one who talks onstage -- activate their sparsely staged revue with a running commentary, packed with highbrow humor and biting the magic wand that feeds them.

A current run at the MGM Grand even has them committing the ultimate Las Vegas no-no -- a thought-provoking piece about flag-burning, the First Amendment and "the ambiguity that leads to individual expression."

"So where is Melinda playing?" you'd think tourists would ask at this point.

But this is a vacation that even vacationers enjoy. Despite a "more downtown" feel than the other Vegas shows, as Penn (Jillette) tells audiences, the duo has been performing on the Strip since 1993 and living here since late 1994.

That's been more than long enough to get used to the successful employment of guys who appear to grind up a little white bunny in a chipper-shredder. It's even long enough for them to get restless and branch out with a too-shortly lived cable TV series, "Penn & Teller's Sin City Spectacular."

With that postmodern variety show gone by the wayside, the current Comdex-friendly engagement has the duo back to its no-frills, moderately priced format. The current show seems to be a "greatest hits" revue with a lot of familiar bits, plus a few I hadn't seen over the years.

The two enter in grand style, via a pair of giant inflatable cartoon characters of themselves. They make such an impression that it's hard to pay attention to the card trick they pull while inside the suits. But, as will often be the case, there's a second trick within the trick.

Next they call up a youngster from the audience for knot tricks that stress their running mockery of both organized religion and the "mysteries" of stage magic: "Don't let him misdirect you," Penn warns the kid about Teller, to no avail.

Despite a hefty dose of what Penn calls "that debunking thing," the two have a reverence for show-business tradition. It echoes in almost every sequence, and belies their cracks about the more formal competition: Lance Burton, "a greasy guy in a tux with a lot of birds," and Siegfried & Roy, "Germans torturing endangered species."

An all-comedy, no-magic knife-throwing stunt doubles as a spoof of how painfully easy it has been for generations of magicians to practice their hocus pocus. An audience volunteer ("Most of this bit is in the selection process," Penn mutters as he scours for a suitable babe) leaves the stage thinking she's been subjected to something highly complicated and dangerous, but the rest of the audience is in on the joke.

The same theme carries through an operatic salute to Harry Houdini and his efforts to debunk mediums and seances. Teller shows how easy it is to deceive the two audience volunteers who staple him to a chair by the necktie. But the sequence is so entertaining we don't mind being fooled. Isn't that the key to any magic that still plays in the microchip era?

Penn talks about the difference between "intellectual and visceral" thrills as he readies himself to juggle three broken liquor bottles -- a feat that works as a balancing act to his super-verbose delivery.

Teller also balances things with Charlie Chaplin-esque pantomime, making shadow puppets and later snipping the shadow of a rose to make petals from the real thing fall to the stage.

The show ends, as it has for years, with the two blasting laser-sighted, .357-magnums at one another, a means of "trading" bullets to the satisfaction of two audience members.

That -- along with the TV show that gleefully brought together trendy rock stars and unsung vaudeville acts -- makes you want to see more of what the two could achieve working on a bigger scale.

After all, it was Penn & Teller who talked up Las Vegas to the Blue Man Group as a place to do the larger set pieces they'd been developing in New York.

But at least we still have "Lift Off for Love," the duo's "exposŽ" of cabinet-trick magic. "That's all the Vegas we got," Penn says.

And perhaps that's for the best. It's certainly been enough up to now.