Review: PENN & TELLER: 50 YEARS OF MAGIC, London Palladium

In a move slightly more staggering than their illusions, globally renowned magicians Penn & Teller have finally got around to their first residency in London’s theatre district. Now both in their seventies, this could turn out to be their West End debut and farewell. 

As the title suggests, Penn & Teller - 50 Years Of Magic is as much about the past as the present: pianist (and musical director) Mike Jones welcomes the audience in with a series of justified and ancient jazz standards, rolling montages on screens around the room celebrate the pair's history and then there’s the more-than-occasional nods to their record-breaking three-decade-long Vegas residency. There’s no shade here: if you’ve got it, flaunt it; and if you’re at the top of your game, then why not literally go to town and hire out the London Palladium for 11 nights?

In many ways, Penn Jillette and Teller are the same as they always were. The former is Barnum incarnate, the physical frame and the booming voice of a circus barker married to an inviting manner which draws us into one trick after another. The diminutive and mononymic Teller, on the other hand, is the near-silent partner with his beaming Alfred E. Neuman face and sublime clowning skills. They wear their recent health issues lightly, moving sprightly for two septuagenarians on one of the capital’s biggest stages.

This, though, should not be seen as a rehash of their past London shows at the Eventim Apollo Hammersmith. Their creative spark is still strong, possibly revitalised by having seen the work of so many of their fellow magicians as part of their acclaimed TV series Penn & Teller: Fool Us. Unlike some of their peers (and despite one bit that comically suggests otherwise), rather than buying them over the internet, they prefer to derive their own tricks based on older ones before adding their signature vaudeville style. 

As ever, there’s a fairground vibe, audience interaction is never far away and slapstick and buffoonery are just as important as anything else here. We’re asked the number of jellybeans in a jar for one early trick, a few in the stalls get to pop coloured balloons and the stage manager has her own turn in the spotlight dressed in a monkey suit, first appearing in a bathtub and later walking on while loudly smacking a pair of cymbals together.

There’s no shortage of sight gags and even, when a bit goes wrong, Jillette is there with a quick quip: after a nervous young audience member was asked to read out some text and paused in the middle of the word “country”, the consummate pro quipped “I heard that means something different over here”.

A major theme emerges over the night of things breaking apart and coming together. A long white cloth is chopped up by a scissor-wielding volunteer and then mysteriously appears whole once more. A pane of painted glass is shattered before being restored to its original form. A routine specifically around the second law of thermodynamics and its concept of entropy (in laymen’s terms: everything turns to sh*t) is, possibly on purpose, split over the two halves of the show. 

More subtle references are the sporadic mentions of the magicians’ origin story. When they first met, Jillette was a sixteen-year-old who hopped trains by day, slept rough at night and made cash juggling in bars. Backstage at a show, he met Raymond Teller (as he was then known), an erudite high school teacher who was there to read aloud his homemade Latin poetry. They bonded that evening over all things magic; the teenage Penn was something of a sceptic when it came to illusionists while the twenty-something Teller had been practicing his card tricks since he was seven. A few years later, both the juggling balls and academic career were cast aside for what has become magic’s most enduring partnership.

These verbal dog-legs down memory lane are (thankfully) slight. Recent West End shows from Steven Frayne (previously known as Dynamo), Jamie Allan and Asi Wind have all found space for stories about how proud their own parents would be to see their offspring on a London stage. There’s enough shameless sentimentality up and down Shaftesbury Avenue without invoking personal childhood memories so it’s refreshing nowadays to see a magic show aimed more at the grey cells than the tear ducts.

If this is the first and last we see of Penn & Teller in the West End, they have done themselves justice with a show that demonstrates how these Vegas mainstays have stayed so popular well into the internet era.

Penn & Teller continue at London Palladium until 24 September.

Read our interview with them here: “My choices were Penn & Teller or prison!” 

Photo credit: Joan Marcus