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Photo by Mic Smith
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Master of illusion
Magician Howard Blackwell, aka Wayne Capps, has been practicing magic since the age of 12 and delights in the awe of the crowd.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Warming up the crowd
The show at Holy City Magic isn’t confined to the stage. Before the curtain opens, guests are treated to close-up magic at the small theater’s bar.
Photo by Mic Smith
Picture this. It’s Friday night in Charleston. You’re downtown. All the lovely people are walking the old streets, spilling in and out of the restaurants and shops. The sounds of laughter and clinking glassware carry on the warm evening breeze. Are you with me? Good.
OK, now picture this. You arrive at the corner of King and John streets. You push open a door, walk up a narrow flight of stairs, and enter a dimly lit room. There are 30 or 40 people inside. Many are ordering from the bar; a few are sitting in seats before a stage. The atmosphere, as if by magic, somehow contains both a mysterious hush and a buzzing anticipation.
Voila! This, my friends, is the first trick of the night at Holy City Magic—to create a space of such intimacy before world-renowned and Charleston-based comedy magician Howard Blackwell blows your mind.
“Charleston offers a little something for everybody, and I think my act fits really well here,” Blackwell says. “We’re known for having unique things, and this show is unique.”
The thing about magicians (and comedians, for that matter) is you can’t ever really tell when they’re being completely straight with you. Once you attend one of Blackwell’s shows, you know he’s not kidding when he says “unique.” Actually, he’s performing a classic showman’s move—he’s underselling. The overwhelming responses throughout a night at Holy City Magic are oohs, aahs, no ways!, head-shakes, head-scratches, pure disbelief and roaring applause.
And it all starts with a little “close-up magic” at the bar. One recent evening, Blackwell asked a lady to draw a heart on a card. After shuffling the deck and asking her to concentrate—his hands always moving fluidly throughout every trick—he then opened her hand. When the lady looked down at her hand, the heart had somehow appeared on it.
“I swear!” she cries. “You’re like the real deal!”
Blackwell laughs. Part of his charm is his ability to disarm the disbelievers with his humor. After all, he’s a comedy-magician, in the manner of The Amazing Johnathan, whom he grew up watching.
“My goal is for the audience to have a good time,” he says. “That’s why I do what I do. I like to laugh with the crowd and have a good time. I love to see that sense of amazement on the audience’s faces when they’re watching me perform.”
Yet for all the comedy, he’s pretty serious about the history of magic. One of the other charms of the Holy City Magic theater is the wealth of magic memorabilia decorating the walls. Blackwell has adorned the place with show posters, tour cards, a signed poster of Harry Houdini, a wand made from the wood of Houdini’s old house, and even some sideshow collectibles (“The old stuff people used to pay a nickel to see behind the tents,” he says.)
The audience can peruse this collection with cocktails in hand until the lights dim. Then it is time to take a seat. Eduardo Pignataro, the stage manager of Holy City Magic and a magician himself known as “Gogo Cuerva,” welcomes everyone to the main event with a request for no one to take videos. Magicians, like comedians, can’t have their acts being broadcast beyond the live stage.
Which is why we won’t spoil the tricks here except to say they live up to the hype. There are card tricks and word tricks and hypnosis tricks and even a mentalist trick involving a special pair of socks. For one of his first tricks, Blackwell swallows a bunch of sewing needles and pulls them out of his gullet all strung together by thread.
“It’s better than watching Joey Chestnut!” one audience member yells, and everyone laughs.
At one point, a $20 bill somehow appears in the middle of a lemon. At another point, a sponge somehow turns into a bunch of scorpions. It’s all mind-blowing, and as the night goes on, the applause get longer and louder.
“Everybody in here will see the exact same thing, but they’ll walk away feeling just a little bit different,” Blackwell says. “A lot of magicians will get wrapped around the act—about how well this sleight of hand is versus how deceiving this trick is. For me, it’s all about entertainment value. I want people to laugh and walk away with a smile on their face.”
And when the lights finally come on again, and the people gather again at the bar or spill back out into the Charleston streets, they are indeed all smiles and laughs. It’s just as Blackwell predicted; it’s as if they are under his most magnificent of spells.
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Get There
Howard Blackwell’s show runs every Friday and Saturday night at Holy City Magic from 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. unless otherwise listed on Holy City Magic’s website. The theater is located at 49 ½ John St. in downtown Charleston. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit holycitymagic.com.
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The man behind the magic
Howard Blackwell, aka Wayne Capps
Age: 46.
Resides in: Charleston.
Claim to fame: Stage magician and mentalist, Holy City Magic.
Double life: Capps is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves. “That’s why I use a stage name,” he says. “I thought, ‘If I’m gonna be a serious guy, I can’t also be the silly magician downtown.’”
Open secrets: Although they say a magician should never reveal his tricks, Capps admits he’s “horrible” about that. “I spill my guts, if I can help develop another magician,” he says, which is why Holy City Magic also teaches four-week stage magic and close-up magic classes to adults.
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When the magician Howard Blackwell was a 12-year-old boy named Wayne Capps, his dad took him, as many dads will do, to a magic shop in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. Capps was, as many 12-year-old kids will be, utterly fascinated. But unlike most kids, this budding magician had talent and, more importantly, drive.
“I worked hard on it all week,” he remembers about his first trick, which he still performs—making small sponge balls disappear in one hand and appear in another. “And I came back and bought something else, and the guy was pretty impressed. So, I kept going. I did my first paid show when I was 14.”
That first show was for a church charity, and Blackwell earned around $30. But more than making money, he was thrilled by the awe of the audience. It was a thrill that would have him performing professionally by the time he was in his late teens, even while deployed overseas with the Air Force. He even put himself through college doing magic.
“But then I took a long break for a while,” he reveals. “I just stopped. I really got tired of doing the kids’ shows.”
With the encouragement of his wife, he began performing again. He traded in his huge truck of equipment and found the perfect space in Charleston to start Holy City Magic. He learned new tricks. He perfected his show. He focused more on mentalism. And now he’s exactly where he wants to be, which is no illusion, just a revelation of hard work.
“I’ve got my show to a point where I’m thrilled with it now,” he says. “It’s an intimate crowd, where I’m able to laugh and tell jokes and connect with the audience. That’s why I became an entertainer.”