A squirrel, crushed dreams and impossible tricks: Inside Penn & Teller’s Toronto return

Famed comedy-magic duo Penn & Teller performed three sold-out shows at Toronto’s Meridian Hall over the weekend, their first time back in the city in 16 years. For anyone who has not caught the award-winning pair’s residency at The Rio Hotel & Casino on the Las Vegas strip the past 33 years, their anniversary tour, 50 Years of Magic, was a chance to see them in action, as part of the Luminato Festival.

A sign on the entrance doors read that “photography and videography are strictly prohibited during the performance,” and people obliged. Another sign in the lobby read “Advisories: Audience interactions, coarse language, adult humour, loud noises.”

Penn & Teller, who have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, also had a merch table, selling everything from t-shirts to bobbleheads — that too was worked into the show with a credit card belonging to a woman from the audience — and a meet & greet add-on option that ticketholders could buy on-site. The matinee also had an audio-described performance for the blind or partially sighted.

Penn Jillette, 71, the loud, brash, talkative one, and Teller, 78 (he legally changed his name to a mononym), the silent one — whom Penn referred to as “my meal ticket” — took the audience through tricks that required the audience to follow along. 

Their routines have a very long set up, sometimes as long as 10 minutes, with twists, history, transparency, jokes and jabs, volunteers, and lots of props — some normal, like coins and cards, some strange, like a human monkey in a chair and a squirrel in a bathtub. You have to pay attention to fully get and grasp the genius of the trick.

 “We are so happy to be here this afternoon, and we’ve said that on stage all over the world, over 12,000 times. And every single time we have meant it, but this afternoon, we really mean it,” said Penn, who’s taken the 50^th anniversary tour to Australia, London, New York, among other cities.

The audience got a glimpse of what they were in for when they walked in the lobby. People were asked to fill in a form with their “surreal dream” and take the sheet with them to their seats. It was for a bit called Battle of Dreams, for which we were asked to crumple them up (ie. “crush your dreams”) and pelt them forward towards the stage. There was also a picture on the stage of jellybeans in a jar that we were asked to guess the amount and write down on a sticky note before the start.

The mostly family-friendly show — there were a couple of F-bombs and drug references —  brought people up on the stage from little kids to adults. Penn’s raison d’être as a magician is to convince the audience, the skeptics, if you will — or “pain in the ass,” as he called them, as well — that these are tricks, not illusions, and that the audience participants/helpers are not “stooges” or plants. 

“You’ll see all kinds of magic, closeup magic, card magic, coin magic, parlour magic, comedy magic, mentalism, illusions, but this is the only show where you will see a God-given miracle,” Penn said at one point.

The show began with a 10-year-old boy helping them with an old staple, the cutting of a polyester cloth, but followed with tricks that Penn makes clear are new from the past couple of years, even if the tour is to celebrate their 50^th year as a partnership. There was one trick Penn pretended he had just ordered online and discovered the instructions were in Spanish, which he proceeded to read and poorly translate.

Near the end, Penn said, “Every single show, people go on social media afterwards, and they write these little caps or reviews. And they’re usually very kind to us. They say, ‘They have some nice tricks. There’s a little bit fun, whatever…but some of the tricks are impossible, unless they are using stooges.’ They write this after our show.” He then asked the audience who thinks they used stooges to raise their hand and proceeded to bring all the skeptics onstage to participate in the next trick. The ensuing routine surely shut them up.