Indulekha Aravind goes backstage with Franz Harary on his “mega magic” show.
Franz Harary is in the middle of his one-and-a-half-hour act, getting ready to be set on fire. Two attractive female assistants wheel out a machine resembling a mini-cannon, which will be used to set the celebrity magician aflame. One of them presses a switch, but nothing happens, no flames leap out. Before the audience gets even a hint that something is amiss, the machine is efficiently wheeled away and a lanky man comes onstage to hand the assistant a torch, already lit. And the rest of the act continues smoothly. Like magic.
The lanky man responsible for this quasi sleight-of-hand is 30-year-old Brian Barry, Harary’s stage manager of six years. “I made that backup plan 15 minutes before the show started, never expecting to use it,” he says. Barry is part of the 140-odd members of Harary’s “Mega Magic,” performing at the slightly overwhelming Kingdom of Dreams in Gurgaon, which projects itself as “India’s first live entertainment destination”. After the show, Harary tells Barry, “That was brilliant.” But Barry can’t rest on that laurel — when the show is over, he has a half-hour meeting with the heads of his different teams to break down the day’s performance. And once he’s back in his hotel room, he mails reports to his assistants about any glitches, the notes for which he had been emailing himself on his phone all through the show.
Barry and everyone else in the show, including Harary, work 14- to 16-hour days. “This is not about the money, no amount of money can be worth this much effort,” says the Los Angeles-based illusionist, while getting his hair done in his dressing room. With his spiked, pale blond hair and slightly stocky build, Harary doesn’t quite fit the stereotype of a magician. But his list of successful of illusions is long; it includes making the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, vanish from the stage, only to reappear with his brothers from the wings; and making the Taj Mahal disappear. In India, the kind of money he’s spent on his show is also difficult to recoup, he says. Harary designs all his illusions himself, which usually involves various prototypes till he is pleased with the final product. This has driven up the cost of one of his illusions to $800,000. “But I’m absolutely thrilled to be performing in India, the birthplace of magic,” he adds.
There’s an hour left for the show to begin, but Harary displays no signs of performance anxiety. Instead, he offers to give me a backstage tour, to compensate for the management’s firm refusal to allow me to watch the show from the wings. Barry and his “men in black” are doing a technical run-through and there’s a minor crisis—one of the wires has “shorted,” which meant something that was supposed to produce sparks would now no longer be able to do so. So after a quick hello, Barry rushes off for crisis management. Harary checks if his change of wardrobe on both wings of the stage is in place, his inspection interrupted by another crew member stopping by to tell him the snake matter has been resolved. Here, crisis clearly comes in various forms, even reptilian.
We go four levels down to the basement filled with all kinds of intriguing equipment. A lot of it is what Harary has designed for his artiste friends/ customers. Among them are some mean-looking spikes, which had been used by Michael Jackson. When Harary started using them, he became lax after a while, finally ending up with one of the spikes piercing through his palm during a performance. “I was screaming ‘Let me out of here’ and the audience was like, ‘oh, he’s really good’,” says Harary, with a wry smile. When he surfaced near the wings, his palm was bleeding profusely; “But my first thought was: where’s a video camera? We’ve got to tape this!” I take him up on his statement that there are no secrets backstage and ask him how he made the Taj Mahal disappear. “Magic, of course,” he grins.
Upstairs, everyone’s now in costume, the dancers adding glitz to the dressing rooms. They work under Danielle, a petite brunette who looks much younger than her 27 years. Danielle joined Harary’s team eight years ago through an audition in Los Angeles, and now choreographs the dances the show is interspersed with, besides assisting him onstage. Wasn’t she nervous about having her lower half switched with her colleague’s (one of Harary’s many illusions)? “When you start, yes, it can be quite nerve-wracking, but after so many years, I don’t even think twice about it,” she says softly. Harary describes himself as a demanding boss, and his crew doesn’t contradict this. “But he’s also a very good boss and the first to tell you if you’ve done a good job,” says Danielle.
It’s almost show-time. Before Harary is whisked away to his dressing room, he tells me there was scepticism about the kind of response his show would evoke in Delhi. “I was told the Delhi audience is too sophisticated for my kind of performance but once I began, I saw the same child-like wonder magic evokes everywhere,” he says. I refrain from telling him that the “high-brow” Delhiite would be more likely to be found at an art gallery in Hauz Khas Village than in the Kingdom of Dreams. But once I get a look at the rows of people enthusiastically applauding while he transports them to Thailand, downtown Tokyo and outer space (the elaborate setting for turning his assistant into a snake and restoring a vase he has smashed to smithereens moments ago, among other things), I can’t help thinking that maybe, just maybe, the art critic too might be swept into Harary’s magical world, if only for a moment.
