<\/p>\n
If you attend the \u201cChampions of Magic\u201d holiday show Dec. 10 at the Scranton Cultural Center, fourth-generation magician Liberty Larsen said, there is a chance you could end up being part of the act.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have an audience member who joins our \u2018holiday party\u2019 as our guest,\u201d Larsen said in a telephone interview. \u201cWe get a kid and make them vanish; that\u2019s a fun one. And there\u2019s a kid who gets to help in my detective act.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the detective act, you can watch a noir style, black-and-white movie starring Larsen on a large screen in real time \u2014 or you can focus on another part of the stage and watch Larsen, in person and in color, portraying a crime solver.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fun,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve never worked in a show before that was so big you get to play with film making.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cChampions of Magic\u201d is big enough for that, and for several other acts as well.<\/p>\n
Larsen\u2019s colleague Fernando Valasco is an escapologist who will find his way, Houdini-style, out of complex situations that sometimes appear quite dangerous. And the duo of Young & Strange \u2014 also known as Richard Young and Sam Strange \u2014 will play off each other as they try to baffle the audience in comic style.<\/p>\n
As the show tours the country, Larsen enjoys sharing some of her family\u2019s history with the audience.<\/p>\n
A fourth generation magician, she is the great-granddaughter of Geri Larsen, who in 1939 became the first woman to perform magic on television. By the 1940s Geri Larsen was starring in a children\u2019s magic show on KTLA as \u201cThe Magic Lady.\u201d<\/p>\n
Decades ago, Geri Larsen toured the country with her husband, William, and sons Bill Jr. and Milt as The Larsen Family of Magicians. Nowadays, when Liberty Larsen is on tour, she is delighted to perform in older, historic theaters where her great-grandparents may have performed so long ago.<\/p>\n
The Larsen family founded The Magic Castle, a private club for magicians and magic fans in Hollywood, Calif., and Bill Jr.\u2019s wife, Irene, who is Liberty\u2019s grandmother, was the woman who originated the \u201cThin Model Sawing\u201d illusion in the 1950s.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore that, they used to have two girls in the box; a girl in the top and a girl in the bottom,\u201d Liberty Larsen said, noting that a more recent variation, developed by Jonathan Pendragon in the 1990s, \u201cuses clear glass. You can actually see through the box.\u201d<\/p>\n
She has been \u201csawn in half\u201d that way herself, and has lived to tell the tale.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people in general just love magic that blows their minds and they don\u2019t know how it happened,\u201d Larsen said. \u201cThey enjoy being completely dumb-founded.\u201d<\/p>\n
Larsen said she thoroughly enjoys working on the Champions of Magic show, where the magicians collaborate as a team in addition to staging their own acts. \u201cA lot of our humor comes through, a lot of silliness and absurdity,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re very playful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Presented by Broadway in Scranton, Champions of Magic is set for 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 10 in the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Memorial Theatre in the Scranton Cultural Center, 420 North Washington Ave., Scranton. Tickets start at $42 and are available at ticketmaster.com\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t
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