Magician Stuart MacDonald bringing new show to hometown Croswell Opera House

ADRIAN — Just as happened with plenty of other people, magician Stuart MacDonald found himself having to pivot to a new way of working after the pandemic hit.

After everything shut down, including his world tour, in early 2020, and after “twiddling my thumbs” for a while, the Adrian native and internationally acclaimed magician developed an online show featuring a character he created: magician Richard Preston. Virtual Croswell audiences got to meet Preston later that year in a series of shows.

Preston turned out to be a huge hit with magic lovers far and wide.

“I became one of the top virtual magicians in the world,” MacDonald said. “People from as far away as Korea were watching.”

In time, there were four different versions of the show. And then, the CW network came calling, wanting MacDonald (and Preston) to be on “Masters of Illusion.” The taping aired this past season.

Now, MacDonald, winner of numerous awards including several International Brotherhood of Magicians and American Society of Magicians awards, as well as the North American Champion and People's Choice awards at the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Magiques (FISM, or International Federation of Magic Societies in English), brings his act — and Preston’s — to a live Croswell audience with two shows at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 17.

Tickets are $25 and $30 for adults and $15 for students and can be ordered online at croswell.org or by calling 517-264-7469.

“The show is going to be really fun not only for fans of Stuart MacDonald but also for fans of Richard Preston,” MacDonald said.

That wording is deliberate, because in the two years since creating the character, MacDonald has seen Richard Preston take on a life of his own, so to speak.

“He’s way more famous than I am,” he said.

Local audiences who saw “Richard Preston” virtually in 2020 or who were at MacDonald’s last live Croswell show in 2019 will see some very different magic this time around.

“You have not seen this show,” MacDonald said. “You may have seen parts of it, but it’s a real turn.”

People will get to see Preston’s latest magic act and some of MacDonald’s own tricks. Those include a new version of the mirror illusion that he fooled legendary magicians Penn & Teller with on their TV show “Penn & Teller: Fool Us” several years ago and some of the material from his “Masters of Illusion” appearance.

There will also be a lot of new material, including “mind-reading effects that are cutting-edge,” MacDonald said, and the audience will even get to do a trick right along with him.

When he first conceived of Richard Preston, MacDonald had a lot of fun doing the research to develop the character because it involved an era he’s very interested in: the 1950s and early 1960s.

Preston has quite the biography. A World War II hero who went on to become a magician, he was the world’s greatest entertainer in his day. Then in 1962, with the Cold War in full swing, he agreed to be cryogenically frozen in order to be able to entertain the first Mars colony in 2050.

But when so many things started to go wrong in the world in 2020, the world’s leaders collectively agreed to thaw Preston out so that his prodigious entertainment skills could be used to help people get through all the difficulties. As a result, Preston became a 1962 guy in a 2020s world, and all the resulting anachronisms show up in his magic act.

The Dec. 17 performances will bring him to the Croswell stage for the first time, complete with glimpses of his backstory including his appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” him with the “Rat Pack” and so on.

“It’s going to be a very funny show. Very funny, and great for kids,” MacDonald said. “Even if you don’t get all the references, you’ll know enough of them.”

And because people who have seen the act get to take that trip back in time, MacDonald said, whenever he’s performed it he’s found that not only do audience members who grew up in that earlier era enjoy the nostalgia, but that it brings two or even three generations together.

Why is magic so enduringly popular? MacDonald’s theory is that it triggers something innate in people that’s rooted in prehistoric days when early humanity saw things happen in nature that they created myths to explain.

“Magic taps into that prehistoric sense of wonder,” he said.

But even within people’s own lifetimes, magic acts bring back memories.

“Everyone has a dad, or an uncle, or a grandpa who said, ‘Want me to pull a quarter out of your ear?’” he said.

For him, it was a telephone lineman.

When he was a child, a lineman working by his house walked up to him and asked him if he wanted to see a magic trick.

“I still remember the name of it. It was called The French Drop,” he said. “I was 6 or 7 years old and I still remember it.”

That long-ago magic trick created a spark within him that has since brought him before TV, online and live audiences around the world and given him a place in the pantheon of internationally known magicians.

Magic has changed a lot even over the years MacDonald has been performing. For one thing, he said, the huge illusions people associate with magicians like David Copperfield “are kind of going away” in favor of more intimate tricks. But “intimate magic can be just as powerful as that on a grand stage,” he said.

He cited as an example one of his illusions, involving a cellphone, that turns out to be funny and emotional at the same time.

“It’s empowering for the magician, but it also gets the audience involved, and it evokes feeling, not just awe,” he said. “I’ve had people in the audience tell me they’d seen something special.”

Because tickets to Dec. 17’s shows have been selling briskly, MacDonald encouraged people who want to see his act (and Richard Preston’s) to get their tickets soon. After all, he said, with where his career is taking him these days, “it could be many years before I get the chance to come back to Adrian and do shows.”

If you go

WHAT: “The Magic of Stuart MacDonald”

WHEN: 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 17

WHERE: Croswell Opera House, 129 E. Maumee St., Adrian

TICKETS: $25 and $30 for adults, $15 for students

HOW TO ORDER: Online at croswell.org or by calling 517-264-7469

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Magician Stuart MacDonald bringing new show to Croswell Opera House