“Soul-searching” might not be the first adjective that comes to mind when someone says the words “magic show.” But Jonathan Tai’s latest magic show was both inspired by some soul-searching and meant to encourage it among his audience.
It’s called “Road Signs,” and it makes a return appearance at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s intimate Liberty Magic venue Wed., April 12 through April 30.
Tai is beginning to make a name nationally as a magician who goes beyond sleight of hand, card tricks and mind reading. Rather, the magical elements are weaved into a show that combines audience interactions with monologue and performance art. In other words, he says, his magic is evolving away from tricks being the main course.
“I'm definitely much more interested in the end of the spectrum of taking people on a journey, and having an arc where, you know, even if you strip away the magic, there's still value to be had,” he said. “And also where the magic and the narrative, they are so tightly intertwined that they drive each other so that one almost could not exist without the other.”
Points of contact
Take “Missed Connections,” the 2021 show he created with his longtime collaborator Alex Gruhin. Devised during the early stages of the pandemic, it debuted as a virtual show hosted by Chicago’s Red Orchid Theatre Company.
The show’s theme was nothing less than the endless choices that face us every moment. And while its online audience of 20 or so was treated to sleight of hand and even tricks involving Scrabble tiles and cell-phone calls, the show was built around Tai’s effort to connect with someone he met on an online dating site. The emotional payoff came from the way he wove his personal story with the audience interactions.
New York City’s off-Broadway 59E59 Theaters hosted a run of “Missed Connections” later that year. Artistic director Val Day said when Tai and Gruhin first pitched her the show, “I had a gut reaction of, ‘Ugh, magic.’” She said she changed her mind after learning the show fit with her theater’s storytelling mission. Day was especially impressed by Tai’s unassuming manner.
“I can’t explain it. I’d never seen a magician be vulnerable,” she said.
The long road to magic
Tai, 33, is slight of build, wears wire-rim glasses and cardigan sweaters — pretty far from the brash, cocky persona one might expect from a professional magician. In fact, he said, his own relationship with magic has been on-again, off-again over his lifetime.
He grew up in New Jersey, the kind of kid who refused to be charmed by magic because even then he knew it was all just tricks. Then, around eighth grade, he caught a magician’s act at a Chinese New Year Party.
“He basically did something that was so impossible to me at the time that it kind of just dropped the floor out from under me,” said Tai. “And it was like I just became obsessed. I just had to find out more about whatever this was.”
In college, he met Gruhin, a dorm-mate, and they staged their first shows together. Tai left college intending to pursue magic full-time, but eight or nine years ago, he gave it up after what he calls a “quarter-life crisis” and that proverbial soul-searching, cross-country road trip (which lasted eight months). Instead, he threw himself into his day job with a medical-software company.
Another change of course came in 2019, by which time he’d moved to Pittsburgh (a city he’d felt at home in after discovering it on another road trip). Not doing magic full-time had left Tai feeling “a piece of myself kind of really missing.”
“I basically kind of took a look at my bank account and was like, ‘Hmm, I could probably make zero dollars for like a year or so, and I'd be probably OK,’” he said.
He quit his director-level job. And for four years now, it’s been all magic, a mix of his theatrical shows, corporate events and private parties; and a unique gig at Troy Hill’s Scratch & Co. restaurant, where a short set of Tai’s table-side magic is a menu option on Thursday and Friday nights.
"A beautiful art form"
In their theatrical work, like “Missed Connections” and “Road Signs,” Tai and Gruhin (who directs the shows) have been inspired by Derek DelGaudio, a young magician whose 2016 show “In & Of Itself” explored similar theatrical terrain.
In a 2017 profile, DelGaudio told the New York Times Magazine he wanted to “break magic.” Tai and Gruhin talk more in terms of expanding its scope and harnessing its power. Gruhin, who lives near Philadelphia and works in educational technology, said he views the shows he creates with Tai as plays. He likens their use of magic to achieve an artistic end to the way songs are employed in stage musicals.
“Why can’t we use magic, which is a beautiful art form that can certainly drive a story forward, not just to punctuate an evening of theater but to help move a story along?” he said.
“Road Signs,” which premiered as an in-person production at Liberty Magic in March 2022, is built around Tai’s own road trip from the mid-2010s.
In a video of one performance Tai shared, he stands before the audience and says, “What’s it like to leave everyone you know behind? To disappear. I felt that urge, to escape everyone who found me familiar so that I could be a blank slate to the world. Maybe in being nothing it’s possible to be anything.”
He wows the crowd of about 70 with sleight-of-hand and mind-reading tricks. But the audience participation in his shows also goes deeper, exploring what press materials summarize as “personal identity, reinvention and escape.” Before the show, for instance, patrons are asked to condense a dream of theirs into a single word and write it on a piece of paper. The responses are ultimately incorporated into the show in surprising ways, abetted by props and theatrical lighting designed to conjure what Gruhin calls “campfire magic.”
There are not many magic-only venues in the U.S. But with his gigs at Red Orchid and 59E59, Tai is helping expand the roster of places where magic is welcome. And this summer, Tai takes his act on a road trip of a different sort: a 12-day engagement at Aiden Stanley’s Underground, a prestigious magic venue in Estes Park, Colorado.
