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REVIEW: King conjures up laughs during afternoon shows

Magician manages to puzzle and amuse his audience at Harrah's Las Vegas

You figure most magicians are kids who never grew up, or else they'd be engineers.

But as Mac King purportedly struggles to keep from swallowing a worm lodged in his cheek ("Don't make me laugh!" he begs the audience) you realize that he's the most juvenile of them all.

And for that we're all grateful.

King's floppy bowl haircut looks as though he's trying out for the role of Tom Sawyer, which also would explain the ragtime-era plaid suit.

His wide-eyed reactions are partly a surprise to the goings-on around him, partly the look of the kid in the back of the classroom who is guilty of something the teacher hasn't figured out yet.

His voice sometimes cracks like a sixth-grader who is going through the change. He laughs at his own jokes. And when a trick doesn't work the way he's led the audience to believe it might, he repeatedly observes, "That would've been cool, though."

King also throws in little Pee-wee Herman-type gags such as pointing to his bare wrist and asking: "Does anyone know what time it its? My watch is off."

To make people laugh at something such as that isn't kid's stuff. It's the art of pulling people into a carefully crafted persona and a skillfully structured show in which jokes play off the ones that came before them, and the magic still manages to be puzzling enough to assert itself amid the laughs.

Small wonder King's two performances each day at Harrah's Las Vegas are among the top entries on the booming platform of afternoon shows.

The Kentucky native started at the Maxim in September 1999 and moved to Harrah's comedy club a few months later (after the Maxim closed for the first time). Harrah's recently announced a contract extension that will keep King there another five years.

The show is a comparative bargain even at its full advertised price of $14.95, with those who buy tickets getting priority seating over those who get in for $5.95 with promotional vouchers available around the Strip.

King and Michael Holly, another comedy-magician at the Sahara, offer a clear afternoon contrast to the Tropicana's magician, Rick Thomas, as well as the nonmagic "Viva Las Vegas" at the Stratosphere and "Bottom's Up" at the Flamingo.

Those shows try to mimic the format of the evening magic/variety shows, and tend to look a little threadbare in their streamlined pageantry. King and Holly could (and do) take their acts into comedy clubs without losing more than their grand-finale stunts.

As such, both shows thrive on the personality that audiences really respond to, not the trick cabinets and choreographed movie music that overwhelm some magic shows.

King's show manages to pull five audience members onstage in the course of an hour. At this particular show, the lively, borderline-ornery crowd defied the usual listlessness of the afternoon time slot.

First came Martha, who kept King on his toes. Because she is deaf in one ear, she stood on his right.

"You'll see all the secret stuff if you stand over there," he said. When the crowd chuckled, he laughed too. "That'd be funny if it wasn't true."

Then she wrote her name on a playing card. The back of the card. That was enough to make the magician's voice crack again.

"I didn't really say which side," he admitted, still laughing, as he fanned the deck for the audience. "Let's see if I can find Martha's card!

"Let's start over again." (Comic pause.) "Howdy. I'm Mac King."

You get the idea. King can play almost any card dealt for comic effect. He brings a 6-year-old girl onstage for a "fishing lesson" that ends with him spitting a live goldfish out of his mouth.

A newlywed couple is subjected to one of the longest sequences, in which King uses a "cloak of invisibility," a yellow rain slicker, to "transport" three cards from the wife's pocket to her husband's.

Finally, there's the familiar, but still-funny stunt of borrowing a $20 bill from a hapless volunteer and making him sweat whether he's ever going to see it again, particularly after it appears to go up in flames onstage.

Things would be fine if the show ended there, albeit a bit front-loaded with more of the momentum in the first half. But King adds an "encore" that manages to both poke fun at Siegfried and Roy while staging his version of a cabinet illusion that they and nearly every other magician use.

King wraps himself in a tarp adorned with caricatures of the German magicians, then turns himself into a white tiger. Granted, it's a stuffed toy. But what else would it be in King's demented child's world?

MIKE WEATHERFORD
MORE COLUMNS

Comic-magician Mac King's daily shows at Harrah's Las Vegas are among the top afternoon offerings on the Strip.

REVIEW

what: "The Mac King Comedy Magic Show"

when: 1 and 3 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays

where: Harrah's Las Vegas, 3475 Las Vegas Blvd. South

tickets: $14.95 (369-5111)

grade: A