Mysto brings classic conjuring to concert hall

Performer has been working on craft since he was a kid By Katie Chicklinski-Cahill Arts & entertainment editor Thursday, Dec. 19, 2019 4:36 PM

Mysto the Magi got his start in when he was a kid. He and his assistant, Quill, will perform at the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis college.

When Mysto the Magi and his assistant Quill Frank take the stage Saturday in Durango, they will be carrying on a tradition going back centuries.

Mysto got started in magic when he was 10 years old. His mother was a schoolteacher who had a student in her class who was a magician. The boy took Mysto and his older brother down to Jack’s Joke Shop in downtown , where they would stock up on magic tricks. The two collected tricks for a couple of years. And then things changed for his older brother.

“When he went to high school, he discovered girls, and he said ,‘Hey, little brother, I just discovered girls, would you like all my magic?’ And I said, ‘Sure,’ and after the combination of what I had collected and he’d collected, I had a half-hour show and started doing birthday parties for $5.”

Mysto and his assistant, Quill, will perform at the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis college.

Mysto had discovered his vocation at the ripe old age of 12. He began honing his craft and putting on shows. “I did my first stage show where I floated a girl from the audience when I was 14,” he said. “We had over 300 people in the audience – we sold out the middle school auditorium.” Except for a brief hiatus in college, Mysto has pretty much been doing magic ever since and, in fact, has been able to do it full time – including for the 12 years he was a Durango resident (he now lives in Denver). And, as a magician who has been at it for a while, he’s had lots of different mentors, he said, and growing up, had the chance to see – and be influenced by – all the great magicians.

“I would say Slydini was an early influence. Max Maven, who happened to be a demonstrator of magic back in the ’70s who then ended up moving to Hollywood. He’s been on television lots and lots of times. He was an early influence,” Mysto said. “The world- renowned entertainer Jeff McBride, who lives out in Las Vegas. He was a friend first and a mentor second. Then , a very famous Chicago magician – they call him the ‘guru of magic’ because he was really the first magician to dive deep into why are we doing this.”

The show Mysto and Quill are bringing to town took almost a year to develop, Mysto said, adding that everything is constantly being refined. The 90-minute show is a nod to the classics.

“All the stage illusions I do are classics of magic. We do a trick that was invented by (Harry) Houdini back in 1900. I float my assistant on a broom that was invented by (Jean Eugène) Robert-Houdin, who Houdini took his name from – he was a very famous magician in France in the 1800s and used to float his son on a broom. So there’s a classic of magic for you,” he said.

“I grew up on Abbott and Costello and The Little Rascals and ‘I Love Lucy’ and the Marx Brothers. So our show is a vaudeville show, and a lot of what we do are little playlets – they have little stories, and in fact, there’s a new piece that we’re going to be doing. It’s literally from Abbott and Costello’s live television show. And we’ve brought it back,” he said. “We’re the only magicians that do it, and we do it in that way. We’ve put our own little twist on it because the characters are different.”

It’s cool to introduce the classics to new generations while adding a twist to them – so it almost becomes a whole new thing.

Mysto’s Really Big Magic Show will feature the magician’s twists on the classics.

“It is a new thing – most of the effects that I do, anybody under 30 probably hasn’t seen it,” Mysto said. “The other thing that I also get is people who are a little bit older, they’ll nudge their kid or their grandkid and go, ‘This is a good one.’”

And in case you were wondering like I was – is there really such a thing a magician’s code of secrecy? Yep, there is.

“That’s right. It is awesome. And secrets are important. Giving away secrets is like giving away your power,” Mysto said. “If somebody says to you, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ being a secret-keeper is like a holy vow. If you give up somebody’s secret, you’ve given up their trust and you’ve leaked their power because they’ve trusted you to hold on to something special.”

A magician who has put in decades of learning his craft, Mysto’s passing that knowledge on to others. As president of the Mile High Magicians, he writes an article every month for their newsletter, covering topics such as costuming, lighting, how to create a character, how to come up with your original routine and script-writing.”

In this age of having knowledge at our fingertips, are people still interested in learning magic?

“Absolutely. It’s huge, it’s expanding,” Mysto said. “There are little magic clubs now popping up all over the country. Almost every major city now has a little magic club where you can go and see magic. It’s not going anywhere. Magic points to something larger than ourselves. And in this day and age, where you can get on the internet and everything can be known, magic is unknowable. It points to the great mystery. This is something that cannot be explained.”

And even though Mysto has been a magician since he was a child, he’s still having a blast, he said.

“It’s my life. It is the most fun thing that I do in this world,” he said. [email protected]