by Hazel Flynn
‘We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.’ — J.K. Rowling
Finally, though, we had to own up to our feelings. It happened one night after the two of us had been out to dinner. Not, as you might be thinking, at a ‘romantic occasion’ restaurant, but Pancake Parlour, Doncaster. As usual we’d had a great time talking and laughing together. We went out to the car and suddenly we were kissing. It all felt very right but we wanted some time to see what might happen and we didn’t want the people around us to treat us differently, so we didn’t let on about what was happening. Well, we thought we didn’t but a couple of months later when we were ready to make our big reveal the people closest to us rolled their eyes and said affectionately, ‘As if we didn’t know! You’re always in each other’s pockets.’
Shev Wanigatunga
There’s a great tradition of magicians and their assistants being romantic partners offstage, in fact it’s a cliché. It makes sense, given how closely you have to work together. Even when things are completely platonic there’s a great deal of intimate physicality involved in illusion work, and the trust has to be absolute otherwise someone could get badly hurt. But Priscilla is the only assistant I’ve fallen in love with. She has many qualities that are really important to me — she’s honest and talented and hard-working and very easy-going. She also happens to be stunning. Cill has her own interests and the work she does with me is only part of her career. She performs as a dancer for TV and music acts including Havana Brown and Natalie Bassingthwaite and in theatre shows. When we’re not working we’re like two kids. We love playing video games on old arcade machines and doing laser skirmish and going bowling. We see lots of theatre and films.
One thing that surprised me about our relationship is how incredibly liberating I found it. For the first time I could be completely open about my work in front of my partner. My previous girlfriends were all ‘civilians’ who didn’t know magic. It might sound a bit crazy but I didn’t ever feel I could let them see how tricks worked. They didn’t push to know, they seemed to understand my view that revealing the secrets of a routine would be a betrayal of the craft. But being able to discuss ideas with Priscilla and being able to show her things I was working on, no matter how rough they might be in the early stages, was an unanticipated pleasure. She’s a great creative collaborator.
Priscilla, Adam and I were in Queensland for a corporate gig when the TV special, titled Cosentino: The Grand Illusionist, went to air in September 2012. We finished the gig, packed up in record time and raced back to our accommodation to excitedly watch it. Even though we’d already seen it on DVD, there was something really special about being there as it was broadcast. I was live on Facebook interacting with fans and the response was fantastic. I had a really good feeling based on the huge online reaction.
Rob called the next morning with the ratings. TV ratings in Australia are artificially divided into what is known as the five-city metro market (mainland state capitals) and the rest of the country. Seven had been hoping for a five-city metro audience of 800,000 people. I could tell from Rob’s voice that we’d exceeded that, but even I was surprised when he said 1.39 million people had watched it in the metro market and another 775,000 people had watched throughout the rest of Australia: well over 2.16 million viewers in total. Amazing! Brad Lyons and Grant Rule and the other Seven execs were over the moon. They remarked with surprise on the fact that the regional figures were about twice what they would have expected, based on the metro ratings. The explanation, I told them, was the ten years I’d spent doing shows in schools, shopping centres and theatres in all those little towns and regional centres.
Ash Whelan
Around this time two unexpected, deeply meaningful keepsakes came into my possession. The first was a copy of Houdini’s A Magician among the Spirits which he had inscribed and signed. The second was very different but just as meaningful. It was a Merlin Award. The Merlins, among the highest accolades in magic, are awarded by the International Magicians’ Society (IMS). There are various category awards in different countries and then there are the big international awards: Illusionist of the Year, Mentalist of the Year, Most Original Magician of the Year and overall Magician of the Year. Pretty much every big name you can think of, including David Copperfield, Siegfried & Roy, Penn and Teller and Criss Angel has won a Merlin at some point in their career and now it was my turn. I’d come to the notice of the IMS thanks to AGT; they liked what I was doing enough to name me Most Original Magician of 2012 worldwide.
IMS president Tony Hassini flew from the US to present the handsome statuette to me in a ceremony at Crown Casino hosted by Molly Meldrum and attended by family and friends, including people such as ‘Mr Smith’ who had helped me along the way. I felt so honoured. Tony Hassini and I went and had dinner together afterwards. He knows everyone who’s anyone in the magic world so I was fascinated to hear his stories. It was a wonderful, memorable day.
As the year drew to a close I met once more with Brad, Grant and Rob at the Seven Network to discuss where to next. They were very keen to work with me again and we soon reached an agreement to do three more specials. Often this is the point at which an artist, having proved themselves, gets rewarded with artistic freedom. But I’d had that from the start and, unsurprisingly, the Seven execs were happy to let me continue to set the artistic vision, including coming up with the look, feel, name and content of the shows. Even though each of the three specials would stand alone, I saw them as parts of a whole — a trilogy in effect — and I wanted a name to capture that. I decided on The Magic, The Mystery, The Madness (MMM) and stuck with it even though the execs thought it would be too long for TV guides. They didn’t understand the artistic vision. The name symbolised the three parts of my act — ‘the magic’ being conjuring and street magic, ‘the mystery’ the stage illusions and ‘the madness’ the escapes. We pencilled in an air-date of August 2013 for the first of the shows. It made sense for me to mount a live show to capitalise on the new TV shows; it would also be called ‘The Magic, The Mystery, The Madness’ and would run nationally through October and November. There was a lot of work to be done but Seven had one more thing they wanted me to think about — appearing as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars.
Grant Rule was the show’s executive producer and he had first asked me if I was interested back at the beginning of the year. I was quite intrigued by the possibility but the timing wasn’t right. I did, however, watch the 2012 season with great interest, imagining myself being put through my paces. As the end of 2012 approached Grant was planning the 2013 season and he asked whether, even though I had so much going on, I might want to throw some competitive dancing into the mix. If so, I would have to start training in earnest right around the time the first MMM special went to air (the others would follow later in the year).
I can’t think of another TV competition that I would consider. MasterChef? Not my thing. Big Brother? Pass. But dancing? Now you’re talking. I’d been hooked on dancing every bit as long as I’d been hooked on magic. But everything I knew about it was self-taught; I’d never taken a dance lesson in my life. I knew the kind of dancing I did in my shows worked well, but how would I go doing the cha-cha or rumba with an unknown partner? Well, there was only one way to find out. I told Grant that come August I’d be in my dancing shoes ready to test my mettle.
Ash Whelan
DANTE
KING OF MAGICIANS
There are so many wonderful characters in the history of magic, but I think Harry August Jansen, who worked under the stage-name Dante, is my favourite. Danish-born and American-raised, he was a protégé of Howard Thurston.
Thurston was quite canny in recognising that Dante would prove too much of a threat if he was allowed to become competition, so he headed off that possibility by sending the younger man out on the road in a Thurston-franchise show.
Dante travelled the world with a big troupe, ranging from
twenty-five to up to forty performers. When I perform overseas to audiences who speak a different language to me and come from a different culture I often think about Dante and how clever he had to be at figuring out what would work in each new country he played. He was a master of illusions and had a wonderful look, with his top hat and goatee. On YouTube you can find clips of him performing in the 1940s. His presentations are impeccable and I love his famed slogan, ‘Sim Sala Bim’.
My admiration for him led to the enormous privilege of meeting his assistant, Miss Moi-Yo Miller. They met when Dante was performing in Australia in the 1930s and Miss Miller stayed with him for the rest of his career and married his son. She’s regarded as one of the all-time great magician’s assistants. In one of my shows I did a piece called ‘Trapdoor’ as a tribute to Dante and I spoke onstage about how much I admired him and how I’d even named one of my cats after him. Some time after the show I got an email from Miss Miller’s daughter, who was touched by what I’d said about her grandfather and asked me if I would like to meet her mother. We arranged a date and Adam and I went along, feeling quite nervous. What an honour it was to meet this lovely and talented lady — then in her late nineties — look through her memorabilia and feel such a strong connection to one of my heroes.
State Library of Victoria ALM93.2/38 (left); State Library of Victoria P.124/NO.498 (top right); State Library of Victoria P.126/NO.504 (bottom right)
Not for a second did I forget to be grateful for the wonderful opportunities that were NOW OPEN TO ME BUT IF I HAD IT TO DO OVER I’D PROBABLY TRY TO PLAN THINGS A LITTLE MORE EVENLY. DURING 2013 I PUSHED MYSELF TO A REALLY CRAZY DEGREE, BUT THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SOMEONE WHO HAS WAITED SO LONG FINALLY GETS THEIR BIG CHANCE — YOU WANT TO DO IT ALL, SEE IT ALL, TRY IT ALL, BE IT ALL.
As you’ll know by now, I’m detail-focused. If you’re on a sinking ship I’m the guy you want to be with. Through force of habit I will have already made a mental note of all the crucial bits and pieces — the corridor layout, which door sticks and which doesn’t, which lifeboat is easiest to get to. I make myself pay attention because from simple conjuring to death-defying stunts, magic is all about attention to the little things and if you’re a professional there’s no room for error.
A singer is usually forgiven for hitting a bum note. With a charming smile or a self-deprecating shrug they move on. As long as the rest of the song comes out right the audience generally doesn’t hold it against them. But a single mistake by a magician can destroy the sense of amazement he or she has worked so hard to create. (I’m talking about pros here; there’s much more tolerance for kids or anyone else just starting out.) Fortunately for me — though maybe not so much for those closest to me, like Priscilla — my intense need to make sure everything is organised to perfection, then checked and rechecked, minimises the chances of making mistakes. There’s no way I would have been able to get through such a frantic and demanding year as the one that lay ahead of me without this emphasis on logistics and planning.
There was so much to do to get ready for the three specials that by March, I was working seven days a week. (I’m glad I didn’t know then that would continue right through to December.) In order to get everything done in time I had three Vegas builders each simultaneously creating different pieces to our specifications. John and Dad were also putting in huge amounts of work.
With a massive effort all around everything came together in time for the filming of the stage portions of the specials, which we did at The Palms theatre at Melbourne’s Crown Casino in June. But despite the months of preparation and rehearsal and the endless checklists, things went dangerously awry with my big stunts and for the first time I really wondered if I had pushed myself and my luck too far.
My first brush with death came doing the big stunt for the very first episode. It was a piece I’d named ‘Stabbed’ and I dreamed it up because I wanted to add a whole new level of difficulty to an escape — breaking free of handcuffs and picking padlocks is only the beginning of this one. The centrepiece of Stabbed is a Perspex box just large enough for my head, with openings on either side through which fit eighteen very large kitchen knives. When the escape begins I am handcuffed and bound by a chain connected to the cuffs. The box is closed around my head and secured with a padlock on either side. The knives, nine on each side, are attached to wires and pulled up to be held in place above the box. They are kept there by a simple pin mechanism controlled by a pressure pad.
Here’s where things get really interesting. In front of me, at chest height, is an open Perspex container of keys. Not a handful, but 350 identical keys. Once I have freed myself from the cuffs the real work begins. I have to sift through the keys to try to find the correct ones for each of the two locks holding the box in place around my head. I have just eighty seconds to complete the entire escape. As soon as I begin, a sand-timer is started, pouring sand down on to the pressure pad. When it reaches critical mass the pin mechanism is released and the knives sweep down and into the box.
The knives are hefty, sharp and very real. They were supplied to me by Nahji Chu, whose Misschu eateries are Melbourne and Sydney favourites. I didn’t know Miss Chu, as everyone calls Nahji, before approaching her about Stabbed, but from what I’d seen of her I thought she would be intrigued by what I was planning, and she was. She also took charge of the keys and vouched for their legitimacy.
Cosentino family collection
Now, you can tell people that the knives are real and they’re sharp enough to cut through anything and everything in Miss Chu’s kitchen, including thick bones, but they don’t always believe you, even the people working closely with you, until something goes wrong. The day before filming we had a full run-through of the show on the Palms stage. It was all going well until the final part of Stabbed when, having successfully opened the second padlock, I took a fraction of a second too long to get my head out of the Perspex box. The pressure pad hit critical mass, the pin released and the knives swung down at speed into the box. I knew immediately I’d been sliced. I dropped to the floor grabbing for my chin, which hurt like crazy. I could feel the blood gushing out. Have I mentioned I hate the sight of blood?
There were dozens of people on and around the stage — the camera crew, rigger, pyrotechnician, stage techs and dancers — and several of them turned pale at the sight of me. They were shocked that I really had been injured. Even though I made a point of saying the knives were real, many of them had assumed I was just saying that to hype the audience up. They thought the blades were just stage props that couldn’t do any harm. For the first time it was sinking in that what I was doing was a stunt, not a trick. If one of the blades could do that to my chin, what would it do to my neck?
The Crown paramedics quickly came in, took one look at me and said, ‘That’s a deep gash, we need to get you to the hospital now.’ They put me in an ambulance and took me to the emergency department where a surgeon examined the wound and said, ‘ We need to get this stitched up.’ John, who had accompanied me in the ambulance, said, ‘He’s got a show to film tomorrow, can’t you just glue it?’ I didn’t take offence but the surgeon raised an eyebrow and said, ‘No, it’s way too deep for that.’ He proceeded to put twelve stitches in, with the camera and sound operators who had raced to the hospital after us catching every tug of the needle through deep layers of flesh. (We ended up using the footage in the special but if you’re able to watch that bit you have a stronger stomach than me!)
Rob and Adam continued to work while I was at the hospital, with Adam standing in for me (but staying away from the knives) as camera positions were checked. It was evening before we got back.
Rob first made sure I was okay, then took one look at the big, very visible line of stitches across my chin and swore loudly. Our wonderful make-up artist, Mars, promised that by the morning she would have a solution for us and I went home to ice the area in an attempt to minimise the swelling. We came in early the next day to set up before the audience arrived. As pro
mised, Mars had come up with some patches that could go safely over the stitches and be disguised with stage make-up. If you didn’t know there was a wound under there you would never have guessed.
The show went ahead as scheduled a few hours later. If you watch the footage of me doing Stabbed, that’s genuine fear you can see. The accident happened because I stuffed up; I was intensely aware that if I wasn’t at the very top of my game something even worse could happen. Fortunately, this time I made it out in the nick of time, but my heart was thumping hard.
Pierre Baroni
Two weeks later it was time to film the next big stunt, which I’d called ‘Dropped’. It had come to me as a visual image: a figure isolated inside a bubble sinking down into the ocean, trying to break free. We came up with plans for a Perspex sphere two metres in diameter, with grills top and bottom to let the water in (otherwise I’d be bobbing along on the surface, not sinking dramatically to the depths). My notion was to have the sphere lowered from the back of a fishing boat, with me locked inside, in the crystal clear waters off Queensland, with underwater camera operators filming the escape.
John and Dad set about having the sphere built. There was no mould in Australia big enough, so a special one had to be created. Finding the right thickness and evenness of Perspex proved to be quite a challenge, but eventually they got it working. It was almost ready when the Seven Network decided that doing the stunt in the ocean was going to be too logistically difficult and expensive.
Rob Peile was back directing again, following our successful collaboration on The Grand Illusionist, and he, John, Adam and I sat down to figure out how to make the stunt work with no ocean. We found a dive-training centre in Melbourne that had a ten-metre-deep pool. It wasn’t a pool in the sense of the suburban dive pool where I’d trained for Anchored, it was a tall concrete silo, half above the ground and half below.