In And Of Itself

Before the Mag­ic Castle tour start­ed, I told Siegfried that I saw Bor­rowed Time on his sug­ges­tion and loved it. He told me that Helder used to do an amaz­ing show called Noth­ing to Hide with a part­ner, Derek Del­Gau­dio. They had been doing the act at the Mag­ic Castle for a while, but Neil Patrick Har­ris thought it was so great it need­ed a big­ger audi­ence, so he set them up with a run at the Gef­fen Play­house. That became such a hit, they even took it to New York for off-Broad­way per­for­mances. Sad­ly, the show has end­ed, but Derek Del­Gau­dio is now doing a solo show back at the Gef­fen called In & Of Itself.

And Frank Oz is the direc­tor? Say no more, say no more! I looked up tick­ets as soon as I got home that night. The crit­ics’ reviews are off the charts!

“It’s hard to imag­ine any evening at the the­ater being more per­son­al, more mov­ing, or more mag­i­cal.” – Los Ange­les mag­a­zine

“Derek has cre­at­ed the best mag­ic show I’ve ever seen and that might be damn­ing with faint praise. It’s Marcel Duchamp and Andy Kauf­man if they could do per­fect bot­tom deals.” — Penn Jil­let­te

I got to the Gef­fen a bit ear­ly and got a drink in the lob­by. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, they told me that I could not bring food or drink into the the­ater, so I had to down my beer. Between the lob­by and the the­ater was a small room with a peg­board hold­ing lots of lit­tle tags, each one print­ed with a dif­fer­ent “I am…” state­ment. The staff asked us to each pick one before we went in. I was sad to find that there was no “I am Bat­man!” tag, so I had to make do:

Then I shuf­fled into the the­ater and the ush­er took the bot­tom half of my tag as he showed me my seat. The stage was set very min­i­mal­ly, but your eyes are drawn to the six win­dows in the back wall, mir­ror­ing the six-bul­let revolver from the show poster.

The show is still on-going, so I will not give away any­thing that hap­pens. I will tell you, though, that the crit­ics were right. The tricks were amaz­ing, but more than that, the sto­ry was mov­ing and it all tied togeth­er real­ly well. I did not see the ele­phant or find the brick. Hope­ful­ly you will see the show for your­self and do bet­ter than I did.