Magician Dan White, who has served as a consultant to David Blaine, David Copperfield and Kanye West, spent a year and a half preparing his own very special show, simply called The Magician. The show is performed for small audiences in a suite at the elegant Nomad Hotel, and the response has been tremendous. StageBuddy paid a visit to the very magical Library Bar at The Nomad to talk with with star and creator Dan White.

Take us back before The Magician.

How far back before? (laughs) It started when I was ten years old. I worked in a magic store in Philadelphia called Hocus-pocus, right up through the beginning of college. It was great because I didn’t have any money to buy props so I had to work for trade. I would get every book I could get my hands on. By the end of ten years I had learned so much that I’d developed an encyclopedic knowledge of magic.

After that I took a break from it and went to school to study something legitimate, which was art history. I really tried to be a regular person for a bit, I thought perhaps I would be a teacher or a painter. I got a job working at Sotheby’s auction house. I worked in their education department. After a year of that I said, “I don’t want to do this anymore; I really want to do magic.” So I told my mother I would give myself a year, and that year I started working for David Blaine, I produced one of his TV specials and soon I was doing gigs around New York; closeup and walkaround magic for private events, that was my specialty. I didn’t do big stage magic; my tools were cards and coins. On top of that I did consulting. I worked for David Blaine for what became five or six years and two of his shows. From there I went to Las Vegas and worked with David Copperfield. In between that I had two TV shows of my own, one for the Discovery Channel and one for the Travel Channel. The whole time I was always thinking of intimate magic on a larger scale.

What did you learn from Blaine and Copperfield?

I learned an immense amount from both of them. From Blaine I learned something that is important for every magician: how to let the magic resonate. David is really a master at that. If you are able to convince someone that you have read their mind but then make the mistake of moving onto something else too quickly, they will forget about it and the power of what you did will be diminished. It’s important to pause and let the magic resonate before you move on. He’s also a master at selecting material that’s right for his personality. For him, it was always right on the line of, “Could this be real?” He gives you that feeling that maybe he knows something about the world that you don’t know. That goes to the very heart of mystery. “Maybe there’s something I don’t know about the universe.” Every magician has to deal with that somehow. What is he claiming to be able to do? How real is this supposed to be? Penn & Teller, for example, reject all of that and simply focus on the skill. “Look how amazing these methods are.” They don’t claim that any of it is real, quite the opposite.

From Copperfield what I really learned was the importance of the theatrics involved, not just how good a magic trick is. The details, the storytelling, these can be just as important.

And your show at The Nomad Hotel is much more than a standard magic show. It has strong theatrical elements, and each detail seems to have been very well thought out. How did it originate?

It originated with (hotelier and restaurateur) Will Guidara. I first met Will at Eleven Madison Park, this sister restaurant to The Nomad. He orchestrated the whole thing. He said, “We love the magic you do and we have a wonderful space for you at The Nomad. We’d love to do something there with magic.” I think we’re kindred spirits in that we both want to do things that are cool and unusual. I’d done standup magic before and I could have easily done a standard ten or fifteen trick set here, but I really wanted to give people an experience. I wanted to do something with just a bit of a story. Not too much of a story; because it isn’t a play. You can’t go into a magic show the same way you go into a play, ever. When you go to a play or a musical, you suspend disbelief and you can accept that a fictional story or character is “real”. But the moment someone steps forward and says that he’s going to do magic tricks that all goes out the window and you don’t believe a single thing that person says!

We produced this show with a company called Theory 11 and every day I would call them on the phone and we would brainstorm. My friend JB and I came up with the central idea that holds the whole thing together and justifies the magic. That part was difficult. We considered time travel at one point, an idea that actually began while I was working with Copperfield. But I decided against it because it doesn’t hit home emotionally. We talked about how we wanted to give people different experiences. We talked about what would happen before the show and afterward. We wanted illusions in the show in addition to the parlor magic. The aesthetic elements are very important, such as the lighting, which is all hand made with motors and inspired by the Metropolitan Opera and their chandeliers that go up at the beginning of every performance. I just love that. All of those theatrical elements were very important.

The idea of memory and its relation to dreams is explored at the end in a way that is very striking.

I think everyone has moments where they wonder, “Did I dream that or did it really happen? It’s almost a reverse déjà vu. My father, who was a painter, was really interested in that. He has a painting in the Philadelphia museum of art called Hypnogogus. It’s a painting of an old man, actually his father, at the very moment he is falling asleep. We see his dream, which is very lucid. I didn’t realize it had any influence on me until I was preparing this show. Lucid dreams and the feeling of déjà vu are the closest things to real magic that people get to experience every day. And magicians are essentially storytellers, we love that stuff.

How did it move from the idea stage to the finished performance?

It was a big, scary moment to turn myself from a closeup performer to a stage, or parlor performer, and to carry a ninety-minute show on my own. It took about a year and a half to prepare. I came from close-up magic, so I’m used to interacting with people. When I’m up there I can see each person’s face. I can hear everybody’s comments. I’m really connected to them. It’s different every night. And Will was very supportive and inspiring the entire time. What he’s done in the hospitality world is amazing, and he brought that into everything that happens before and during the show. He works with an incredible chef, Daniel Humm, and they take theatrics and apply it to the food, the drinks, everything. The drinks were specifically designed for the show by Leo Robitschek. They all have magical names, and some of them have mirrors in the glasses or other magical elements. The popcorn on the tables actually changes flavor throughout the show. Everything has a sense of whimsy. Everything they do and everyone involved is devoted to making everything special.

As someone who comes from a background in art, is there an artist that you admire and has been a source of inspiration for you?

Walt Disney has been a source of inspiration for me. Also my father, Ben Kamihira, whose work has always been very dreamlike. Also, I’ve always been drawn to the drama of Spanish and Italian baroque art, Valazquez and Caravaggio have always been my favorites. Caravaggio was always on my mind when we were designing the lighting. For me the theatricality of Catholicism has been very meaningful. The theatricality of any religious service has always struck me. When I worked with Kanye I discovered that he felt that way too, in his way, and that was a source of inspiration for both of us, a common connection. The visual aspect of religious ceremonies have always inspired me.

What are you doing next?

I’m always doing events and private engagements. The next thing on my agenda is a unique masquerade event. That, and continuing to make this show more special. It’s been open for four months, and it’s been getting a great response. Yet I want to keep working on making it better and better. Every day I’m thinking of how we could improve it.