Friday, January 30, 2004 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

SHOW REVIEW: Steve Wyrick has trouble getting any respect

If magician made issue part of his shtick, his show could improve

Magician Steve Wyrick performs nightly except Tuesdays.

It's a constant struggle for respect for this Steve Wyrick guy.

During his three-year tenure at the Sahara, other magicians -- perhaps just jealous -- snickered about his show. One magician's trade magazine called his card trick "bumbling."

But Wyrick persisted while other magicians remained on the sidelines. Around Christmas, he not only moved to the Aladdin, but also built a nice, new 600-seat theater within a bare-bones space to accommodate his show.

Alas, the respect thing still haunts him.

Shortly into a show last week, Wyrick set out to collect three women's wedding rings he intended to link together inside a brandy snifter. The first woman he approached shook her head.

"I guess that's a no, huh? he said, but didn't give up. "I'm not gonna bite, I'm Steve."

Later, he headed down to the sidewalk in front of the Aladdin for the new "street magic" segment that's the most novel departure from the Sahara show.

As the paid audiences watched a video screen from its theater seats, he attempted to gather a crowd on the cold, windy sidewalk. A trio of Asian women paused, then hurried to run into the casino. "Can you believe this is really happening?" Wyrick asked.

Somehow, yes.

Later, he pulled a guy onto the stage for a card trick by offering him a beer. The beer arrived, but the guy refused to taste it. A confused Wyrick observed, "So when I said, `How's a beer sound?' You just said it sounded good because you don't drink."

The guy didn't know how to cut a deck of cards either, which made Wyrick seem slightly less suspicious and set him up with a good bailout line: "You don't drink and you don't play cards. What are you doing in Vegas?"

The comeback line was encouraging, even if, shortly thereafter, the magician bumped the full beer and almost knocked it over during the card trick. As it's often said, the personality of the magician is what sells the act, not the mechanics of the tricks.

Wyrick has been around long enough to have the latter running pretty smoothly. The large props from his Sahara show pop impressively from the low, wide stage. The show begins with the sudden appearance of a Hummer H2 and ends with the similar arrival of a small airplane.

In between, there's a "death crane" that whirls saw blades over the front row, and a motorcycle stunt carried over from the other show, in which both rider and bike vanish from a platform hoisted into the air.

The lighting is slick and a cool modern-rock and electronica soundtrack moves the action along. Some of the best bits are the ones with no talking at all, such as a hotel lobby sequence -- another carryover from the Sahara -- that weaves several modestly amusing tricks into brisk choreography with a half-dozen female dancers.

It's that talking stuff that's troublesome. Wyrick never seems sure if he's David Blaine, David Copperfield or David Carradine. He wears black leather pants, but he's no studmuffin. He tries to make jokes, telling people on the sidewalk, "I'm Frank, Steve Wyrick's brother," but for all they know he might be.

And when he says, "Let's see if all three la-a-y--dies get their rings back," we're not sure if he's being deliberately cheesy or just happens to sound like Tim Meadows' "The Ladies Man" character from "Saturday Night Live."

So what does this leave us with? A competent, nice-looking magic show that serves well for those not yet familiar with the basic repertoire of stage illusions or those who don't want to shell out the big bucks for Copperfield, who is sort of James Bond to Wyrick's Maxwell Smart.

The show could be more, but only if and when Wyrick hones in on a stage persona. My suggestion: Make a negative into a positive and turn this whole Aretha Franklin "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" issue into a Jack Benny-type shtick, as Wyrick does when a poodle he uses for one illusion won't give him any love.

"Don't do anything and make me look very silly," he says to the dog.

At least, we hope that was part of the act.