In search of a magical place

David Copperfield, the world’s best known living magician, has been scouting Island locations this spring for his next national television special.

'Tornado of Fire' David Copperfield TV special, 7 p.m. April 3, CBS (KGMB 9)

He needs a location where it will be "sunny and bright" — and full day — at the same time that he’s setting up an illusion in a live show at night on the East Coast, he explained. Hawai‘i suits his needs beautifully, he said, but he wasn’t ready to say for sure that the Islands would be his choice for this outing.

"We’ve been surveying sites for something I do in my live shows, where I take people and literally vanish them from the stage and make them appear somewhere else," said Copperfield in an interview at the Kahala Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

The trick requires him to station TV crews in designated time zones and will be part of his 20th anniversary magic special, to be televised April 3 on CBS.

When he’s doing a show on the West Coast, for example, he has crews waiting in Indonesia. He has made people disappear and reappear in Bali, or sent audience member’s credit cards to other locations.

The technique is called the "portal," he said, as in a gateway, and it has become a popular part of the new show he hopes to someday present in Hawai‘i.

"It’s really quite unbelievable, because I get to play games with Mother Nature — in this case, defying the logic of time and space. The audiences love it when people wave back from a distant place," he said.

Surprise is the key, said Copperfield.

"For a singer, surprise is not expected, even though Madonna has survived with surprise, so maybe she’s the exception," he said. "But as a magician, I’m forced to surprise people, so I have to keep myself interested and create surprise in both the physical challenges aspect as well as the delusions in the show."

Copperfield’s very first professional gig was in Hawai‘i in 1975, at age 19, when he headlined an engagement at the C’est Si Bon supperclub at the Pagoda Hotel. Since becoming this generation’s Houdini, Copperfield has made the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China and the Orient Express disappear; he’s survived a tumble over Niagara Falls and he’s escaped a bed of jaws and from straitjackets while suspended in the air. He’s even created a snowstorm and flown through it in front of a live audience.

Through all his fame and travels, however, Copperfield said he retains a lingering affection for the Islands. Earlier, he intended to include a Madame Pele facet in a TV special, but nixed the idea when told that it’s risky to toy with the volcano goddess.

The portal piece will be part of the upcoming TV special "David Copperfield: Tornado of Fire," originating from New York, before a live audience. The "tornado" aspect, only for TV, will be a perilous new illusion he is still trying to master, in which he again plays with natural laws. The goal: to create a man-made (well, machine-made) tornado with the velocity of a real one, combining it with fire, and then to place himself in the eye of the twister.

"I haven’t been successful yet," he said. "I kind of get into the condition of feeling comfortable, then something happens when I feel it’s not safe yet. It’s a physical challenge; not a disappear, reappear thing. Being inside of a tornado is a thrilling experience. I’m held down with big straps; the other danger, when it’s not a real tornado, is that you can get sucked up into these huge machines" with blades the size of those on a helicopter.

"My job is to defy Mother Nature, to challenge her, regarding gravity, time, space, all of that," he said. "One of the most amazing forces of Mother Nature is the tornado."

If he’s able to perfect it, Copperfield predicts the tornado trick will be a blockbuster, and "better than the movie."

But there’s a lot at stake. "Potentially, I can kill myself. I have to find the center, the core of the tornado, which is the safe spot of the tornado, without the tornado touching me. I pump enough cold air to not get close to 2,000 degrees of a column of fire around me. I’m wearing Nomex fire-proof clothes, which, if the fire touches me would burn anyway, because it’s that hot. With that kind of temperature, the whole thing would turn into a potato chip. Literally crumble."

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