A fourth-generation magician, Liberty Larsen enjoys performing with Champions of Magic. Broadway in Scranton will bring the touring show to the Scranton Cultural Center on Dec. 10 for one show only.
Champions of Magic Show
Submitted Photo
No matter how close to impossible his situation may appear, escapologist Fernando Valasco has always managed to escape — so far. You’ll see him in action if you attend the Champions of Magic Show Dec 10 at the Scranton Cultural Center.
Champions of Magic Show
Submitted Photo
If you attend the “Champions of Magic” holiday show Dec. 10 at the Scranton Cultural Center, fourth-generation magician Liberty Larsen said, there is a chance you could end up being part of the act.
“We have an audience member who joins our ‘holiday party’ as our guest,” Larsen said in a telephone interview. “We get a kid and make them vanish; that’s a fun one. And there’s a kid who gets to help in my detective act.”
In the detective act, you can watch a noir style, black-and-white movie starring Larsen on a large screen in real time — or you can focus on another part of the stage and watch Larsen, in person and in color, portraying a crime solver.
“It’s fun,” she said. “I’ve never worked in a show before that was so big you get to play with film making.”
“Champions of Magic” is big enough for that, and for several other acts as well.
Larsen’s colleague Fernando Valasco is an escapologist who will find his way, Houdini-style, out of complex situations that sometimes appear quite dangerous. And the duo of Young & Strange — also known as Richard Young and Sam Strange — will play off each other as they try to baffle the audience in comic style.
As the show tours the country, Larsen enjoys sharing some of her family’s history with the audience.
A fourth generation magician, she is the great-granddaughter of Geri Larsen, who in 1939 became the first woman to perform magic on television. By the 1940s Geri Larsen was starring in a children’s magic show on KTLA as “The Magic Lady.”
Decades ago, Geri Larsen toured the country with her husband, William, and sons Bill Jr. and Milt as The Larsen Family of Magicians. Nowadays, when Liberty Larsen is on tour, she is delighted to perform in older, historic theaters where her great-grandparents may have performed so long ago.
The Larsen family founded The Magic Castle, a private club for magicians and magic fans in Hollywood, Calif., and Bill Jr.’s wife, Irene, who is Liberty’s grandmother, was the woman who originated the “Thin Model Sawing” illusion in the 1950s.
“Before that, they used to have two girls in the box; a girl in the top and a girl in the bottom,” Liberty Larsen said, noting that a more recent variation, developed by Jonathan Pendragon in the 1990s, “uses clear glass. You can actually see through the box.”
She has been “sawn in half” that way herself, and has lived to tell the tale.
“I think people in general just love magic that blows their minds and they don’t know how it happened,” Larsen said. “They enjoy being completely dumb-founded.”
Larsen said she thoroughly enjoys working on the Champions of Magic show, where the magicians collaborate as a team in addition to staging their own acts. “A lot of our humor comes through, a lot of silliness and absurdity,” she said. “We’re very playful.”
Presented by Broadway in Scranton, Champions of Magic is set for 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 10 in the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Memorial Theatre in the Scranton Cultural Center, 420 North Washington Ave., Scranton. Tickets start at $42 and are available at ticketmaster.com/.
