Enrico de la Vega (at right) has helped produced some of the most popular magic television in the world in his work with Cyril. He’s also a performer in his own right and an all around nice guy. He shared with us the three best gigs of his career.

I’ve been fortunate to have been involved in a lot of productions… a whole lot. I’ve been a tech, grunt, assistant, filler act, roadie, performer, stuntman, stage manager, producer, consultant, designer, and director. But of all the gigs I’ve ever been involved in, the best ones were not particularly the ones where I was performing, but the ones where I paid attention enough to learn the most.

Franz Harray’s Tour Going on tour is a blast. Working on tour can be a beast. For about 7 years, I worked with Franz Harary (pictured above). I was a tech and a grunt on his tours until he realized that I also performed magic. Shortly thereafter he asked me to be a filler act in his show. Now I don’t know how much most of the readers here know about Franz, but that guy is one smart mofo. He’s definitely not on my list of favorite performers, but he’s an incredible businessman and is influential as all hell. He’s also probably the only magician alive that could potentially do a full 4-hour grand illusion show with effects that only he created. Try saying that about anyone else.

Harary does everything big, hence the name of his genre “Mega Illusion.” He tours big. And I mean BIG. Like U2, Michael Jackson big. I learned volumes from being on tour with him: what makes an illusion show work and what doesn’t; what to do and more importantly what not to do. There’s way too much to list here, but believe me when I say there’s a ton; most of which the majority of readers here wouldn’t care about even though they should. Nevertheless, performing onstage on a Harary tour can make you feel like a rock star. I’ve done solo manips in front of audiences of 20,000 people, I taught Usher how to vanish into flames, and I even performed for royalty. Not a bad gig at all.

Ragtime This next gig is huge; I also got it through Harary. He designed the illusion performed by the Houdini character in the Broadway musical Ragtime and asked me to supervise the execution of the illusion for the LA production. I taught the Houdini doubles how to perform the stunt and how to sell the illusion; then the director asked me to stay onboard for the duration of the show’s run. Now, if you’ve never seen Harary’s Houdini Box, you’re missing out. It’s incredibly deceptive and convincing. So convincing in fact that it had to be toned down because it shocked the audience so much that it was difficult to get them back into “theater mode” after the illusion was performed.

So besides the illusion, what made it such a great gig? I learned more about live performance while working on Ragtime than anywhere else. I was a sponge. I went to the theater even when I didn’t have to be there. During rehearsals I sat next to Tony Award-winning director Frank Galati; I sat in the light booth with Tony Award-winning lighting designer Jules Fisher. They answered my questions whenever they could… and I had A LOT of questions. I learned everybody’s names and gained access to every department just to find out what it really takes to run a Broadway show. When the show began its run I shadowed the stage managers, sat in the control room, hung out with the backstage crew, even sat in the orchestra pit with the conductor during the performances. It was truly awesome. For nearly two years I pretty much attended the most hands-on, real-world, live-theater training course… and I even got paid for it. Not to mention that four nights a week, I vanished from an exploding box suspended high above the stage… even though Houdini got all the glory. Best gig ever.

T.H.E.M. When my business partner Chris Gongora and I created it, we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into, only that it was something that needed to be done. We teamed up with executive producer Ken Mok from America’s Next Top Model and put together our very own magic show for NBC. Looking back on it now, we had a lot more freedoms than would otherwise be granted to network first-timers. We had full creative control over all of the magic but we weren’t so full of ourselves as not to listen to everyone else involved. As a result, we produced a really fun show. Sure, we didn’t know anything about producing a TV show before we started, but we sure as hell knew all about it by the time it was finished. The executive producer and supervising producer both knew that we lucked into our producer positions, but that didn’t stop them from taking every opportunity to turn us into the producers that we needed to be in order to make the show a success. Once again, I was a freakin’ sponge. They’d pull us aside every now and then to give us little tidbits of their producer’s wisdom. We learned the nuances of show running and the intricacies of television production. And in the end, we earned our titles. It was an incredibly challenging gig; but the fact that we were able to cast all of our best and most-talented magician friends in the show made it priceless.

Oh yeah, and having an office that shared a wall with Tyra Banks wasn’t so bad either.

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