Review: AMAZE at Straz Center

For two hours on a Friday night, I escaped this crazy, hectic life, left adult reality behind and stepped back into the world of childhood make believe at Amaze at Straz with magician extraordinare Jamie Allan. 

With high-resolution cameras inches from his hands showing on the huge led screen center stage, Allan mesmerized with closeup Magic tricks, leaving no room for cheating. Allan ensured we see everything. 

Allan combined my three favorite things... heartfelt expert storytelling, audience participation (especially children), and the unexpected, the unexplainable. Yes, all tricks ARE explainable, but even the skeptics in the crowd were left with mouths hanging agape. How the heck did he do what he just did?

Throughout the evening, Allan combined high tech magic tricks like using iPads (his first televised magic trick that started his professional career) with no tech magic (the very first card trick he learned from a magician's book collection). No matter what the style, we were left in awe, questioning how it happened.

The world has an antique store and Allan's loving mum to thank for giving her son a deceased magician's estate of tricks, the gift of magic that we enjoyed, gobsmacked.