Sunday, April 11, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

MIKE WEATHERFORD: These are good times for King

How do you measure success? The awards? The show counts? Or being "cartooned"?

Don't bother answering. Mac King is a winner on all three counts.

King jokes that it's "a bit of a bummer" to be named Magician of the Year by the Academy of Magical Arts. He'll be honored on May 1 in Los Angeles.

"Now I can no longer say I'm the only magician in Las Vegas who's not the Magician of the Year," he says.

King recognizes that marquees shouting about various awards and readers-poll designations are more plentiful than neon on the Strip these days.

The public can't -- and shouldn't really be expected -- to understand the satisfaction of an award from the society based at Hollywood's Magic Castle nightclub, where King used to perform while watching David Copperfield or Siegfried & Roy be named Magician of the Year.

"Honestly, I never dreamed it would be me," Harrah's afternoon star says. "It's always been the big cheeses."

Granted, Las Vegas success elevates even medium cheeses. Fellow afternoon star Rick Thomas won the same award for his Tropicana show two years ago.

But King doesn't just sell tickets in the afternoon. He sells them his way. Not with the big illusion boxes and showgirls, but with a plaid suit and goldfish; the same ragtime-era hayseed routine he used on the stand-up comedy circuit before moving here seven years ago.

(Talk about reciprocity: Nick Lewin, the comedy-magician whom King followed into the bygone Maxim, will fill in for him at Harrah's Las Vegas during his vacation, April 20-May 1.)

Perhaps even cooler than the award is that audiences didn't need it to get behind King's show. They already identified it as the rare combination of a unique attraction and a genuine bargain on the Strip.

For the spring-break season, King moved from Harrah's 360-seat Improv comedy club to the 560-seat Clint Holmes Theater. Recently, a two-show afternoon totaled 860, "the most people we've ever had," he says. He will be back in the big room from May through September.

The best could be yet to come: King and his illustrator cousin, Bill King, have sold a Sunday comic strip to Tribune Media Services, which will syndicate it in July. It's called "Mac King's Magic in a Minute," and "each week I teach my monkey assistant Lewis (and thus the reader) how to do a simple trick or gag."

"It doesn't mean anybody has agreed to buy it," King cautions. It's hard for newspapers to find a strip to drop. But King's is one of only two new strips Tribune will introduce this year. The other is by "Bloom County" creator Berkeley Breathed.

With Siegfried & Roy no longer the only Las Vegas magicians to be "cartooned," King may be on his way to big cheese status after all.

Mike Weatherford's entertainment column appears Thursdays and Sundays.