Astonishing Lior Suchard a mentalist not to miss at the Palms

Be choosy in selecting a mentalist. You will never forget your first time.

Some folks take pride in checking off each Cirque du Soleil on the Strip. For others, that first great Broadway musical creates a lifelong desire to see more.

Lior Suchard is a fine, fun mentalist working the Palms at a great price for six more weeks; young and charming enough for the ladies to surely pick him as their first-time guy. But he made me realize the genre doesn't wear well with repetition, and he's best appreciated if you've never seen anyone else do the same type of act.

Some of his stunts I had never seen anyone else do, and those of course are the ones that floored me.

The rest of the audience in the well-matched setting of the groovy little Palms Lounge didn't get paid to see every show in town. They seemed to be across-the-board wowed by just about everything the energetic Israeli packed into a brisk hour.

But the mere fact that other people do this stuff reminds you that, sorry kids, these are tricks he's doing and he really can't read your mind.

At one point, Suchard fills in squares with 16 numbers and, when he apparently hasn't guessed the original one the audience member thought up -- 72 -- he proceeds to show how those rows of four numbers add up to 72 any which way you tic-tac-toe them.

Don't know how he did it if the guy wasn't a plant, since the audience member doesn't give up his number until the easel pad is filled in. But Irish magician Keith Barry also did it in 2008.

A couple comes to the stage and when one is blindfolded and the other tickled, the blindfolded one feels it. When Alain Nu did it in 2002, I wrote that it was a stunt I'd never seen. When Barry did it too, that made twice.

And Suchard's finale is a variation on what they call "the prediction board," done all over town for years. Random audience members contribute bits of information -- the actor Bradley Cooper, a Mustang for him to drive -- before Suchard produces a letter containing all the facts from a well-stapled, previously inaccessible envelope.

The secrets of stage mentalism have not been laid as bare as conventional Vegas magic. Even without watching masked magicians on TV, common sense tells you that people somehow fit inside those odd boxes.

But some of Suchard's stunts astonish. How did he produce the paper with my name and the two-digit number I picked in mere seconds? How was he able to write down the name (Margie) of audience member Courtney's first love?

Hmm. If Courtney paid in advance on a credit card and if he talks about Margie on Facebook. ... If not? Then this is a good bit.

So too is a stunt where first one, then two, then five people get a chance to keep $200 if they can keep Suchard from guessing which clenched fist hides the cash. The first guy, he admits, offers a 50-50 guess.

By the 10-fist elimination, however, Suchard must be a keen observer of "tells" more suited to poker players than stage illusionists. ("It's all about the eyes," he informs us.)

Throw in some spoon-bending, and sunglasses jumping from the hands of one audience member to the other. Any way you add it up to 72, Suchard makes a fine choice to be your first -- and last -- mentalist.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.