Friday, December 12, 2003 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

SHOW REVIEW: 'Xtreme Close-Up' has plenty of tricks up its sleeve

Show's small venue perfect for showcasing sleight-of-hand tricks

Steve Dacri is a veteran sleight-of-hand artist performing at The Orleans.

There's a reason why most Las Vegas magic shows focus on the big props and illusions often known in the trade as "cabinet tricks": You can see them from the back row.

But all the "death saws" and Bermuda Triangle-ized aircraft tend to crowd out a more respected form of magic known in the rest of the world as sleight of hand. It's based on skills a magician has to learn and practice, rather than carpentry he can buy on the Internet.

Steve Dacri is a veteran sleight-of-hand artist who for years was a frequent performer at Caesars Magical Empire, a themed attraction that had its own small theater dedicated to close-up magic.

Dacri and his wife and stage assistant, Jan, took the bold move of moving to Las Vegas after the Empire closed last year. Now he's trying to solve the business quandary of finding a profitable way to showcase his skills.

You see, the basic premise of show business is the more seats one sells, the more money one makes. But the smaller Dacri's crowd is, the better the show. Last weekend he performed to 14 people, rendering his wife's shaky camera close-ups unnecessary.

Dacri is holding forth into January with what he calls a "showcase" in a back room of Sazio's restaurant inside The Orleans. It's a dinner show, but less in the mode of "Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding" than the dignified manner of Hollywood's Magic Castle nightclub, the original inspiration for Caesars Magical Empire.

While the raucous strains of the "Ba Da Bing" revue bleed through from across the hall, Dacri offers a civilized dinner followed by his low-key banter and some genuinely perplexing trickery.

How does he get those signature foam balls -- he calls them "Martians" -- into a person's closed fist without that person feeling it? How did he move those silver dollars from one fist to the other?

"Don't try to figure this out, you'll just get a headache," he advises his audience.

The setup enables Dacri to stage much of his show from a small table and focus on card trickery the big shows largely avoid, one of them amusingly using an "Iraq's Most Wanted" deck.

Almost everyone in a crowd of 14 gets recruited for the act, with two called up for extended service. The first one, female, helps put a razor blade into a box, where it seems to shred all but the card she previously selected.

The second one, a male, gets coached in how to do his own close-up handkerchief trick, with Dacri one-upping him along the way.

The grand finale enables Dacri to answer the question of why a drum kit has been sitting in the corner of the room all night, as a "Magical Mystery Tour" solo helps produce a card that has been written off as missing.

Dacri says he's working toward a comedy club-style format that could offer two or three close-up magicians such as Dan Hill, who worked between courses as an opening act at this show. It's an idea ripe for exploration. A variety of styles would help the current edition's tendency to offer a little too much of the same thing.

Dacri might likewise ease up on some of the dinnertime video footage, which jumps the gun on some tricks to be seen later and provides a few too many reminders that the act you are about to see dates back to the leisure-suit era of Merv, Dinah Shore and "Candid Camera."

But that doesn't make it any less remarkable. If you can handle the loss of anonymity a darkened showroom usually provides, Dacri offers a real change of pace for locals who have exhausted all the usual tricks up their sleeve for entertaining holiday visitors.