Clock ticking on ‘Believe’ changes

It's getting harder to believe in magic.

The nice folks at Cirque du Soleil were kind enough to let me in to the new "Criss Angel -- Believe" last week without me sneaking around to buy a ticket, partly in response to poisonous exit interviews first-weekend patrons gave the Review-Journal's Doug Elfman.

I agreed not to review the show before its official Halloween debut, keeping with the newspaper's policy when preview tickets are discounted. "This is called a soft opening," Angel reminded the audience at the end. "It's still being evolved and developed."

But there isn't much time left to live up to promises made when the show was announced in March of last year. "Imagine if we could reinvent magic like (Cirque du Soleil) reinvented the circus," Angel said, pledging "an experience that redefines what magic is and what it can be."

"What we're working on and workshopping, the world of entertainment has never seen," added the show's director, Serge Denoncourt. "It's never been done before. I know that's hype but it's true."

They still have 26 whole days to put that stuff in. So far, Angel has made good on one vow: not to box in the tricks with cabinetry. But the illusions are otherwise the same ones seen up and down the Strip. (That's fact, not critical opinion.)

One, where a person appears to pass through Angel's torso, has its own Wikipedia entry explaining the secret. I wondered how any of these classics could be kept secret in the Internet era. Apparently, they can't.

It could be Cirque didn't go to the right people. A handful of behind-the-scenes illusion builders are recognized as the go-to guys for the major magicians. It's said they did not sign on with Cirque because Cirque wanted to buy their work outright. The usual practice is that the builder retains the rights to the proprietary idea, selling the same illusion to different magicians.

Given Cirque's immense resources, maybe the idea was to avoid the usual suspects and recruit some new thinking. Hey, they still have three weeks to make some calls.

One of the self-described "nuts and bolts guy(s)" is Bill Smith, a Las Vegan who works for Lance Burton and others. "There are only so many things you can do onstage. Cirque has found this out," he says. "It's hard to take the stuff that already exists and improve upon it."

Still, he reminds me of a couple of recent successes. Penn & Teller have a gory new twist on the old sawing-in-half trick. David Copperfield and another person vanish astonishingly from a type of forklift suspended over the audience. Both, Smith says, apply new procedure to old principles.

OK, so maybe I still do believe in magic. So far, it's just not at a show called "Believe."

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