The Wizards' Club of Chicago, the oldest independent magic club in the city, honored comedy magician Edd Fairman, Wizard of Sorts, with the “Bob Sharpe Stage Magic Trophy” on Oct. 1. The competition is held every year among club members with one being chosen “Stage Magician of the Year.”
Fairman is a full time professional magician who moved to Chicago just two years ago. In that short period of time, Fairman has performed for some familiar Chicago businesses and groups such as Marshal Field’s, The Drake Hotel, The Museum of Science and Industry, Whole Foods, The Four Seasons Hotel, Smurfit-Stone, The Shedd, Ford Motor Co., and many others.
The competition for Best Stage Magician is held each year by the Wizards' Club of Chicago. This year’s competition consisted of four entrants performing magic with everything from cards, to rope, to birds, and even to a borrowed suit coat.
Fairman’s award-winning act was a mix of magic and comedy. It included a trick where three ropes of unequal sizes all magically change to the same size. This may be a familiar trick to many people out there but this is where the familiarity ends. Then a bracelet was introduced and the bracelet linked onto the rope, then was magically removed, the ends of the ropes came off creating an endless loop of rope, and then the ropes returned to normal.
In the middle of the trick, Fairman wryly asks if he is going too fast for anyone. He offers to do the trick again in slow motion. He’s not kidding about the slow part, but the audience never does figure out how he does it. Fairman emulates a pro football slow motion replay complete with music as the “ring goes through the rope again.” It’s a visual pun well worth the laugh and the 30 seconds it takes to play out.
After returning the ropes to their original condition, he uses one of them to perform an escape act. With his wrists bound to his knees by an audience volunteer, and obscured by a borrowed suit coat, he attempts to escape. Unsure of where exactly to place the suit coat, the magician's hands are continually seen popping up from behind the coat to adjust its position, only to have them seen bound tightly a second later. Exasperated, the Wizard of Sorts pulls out the directions to the trick—and the paper instructs him to cut the rope with a knife in order to escape. In the comic melee, Fairman accidentally thrusts the knife right through the man’s coat. But with just a little magic the coat is restored and Fairman takes his bow.
It’s easy to see what drew this magician to magic. He is an energetic young man who tends to speak very quickly and animatedly, even when he’s not on stage. Fairman holds a BFA in Theatre from Point Park University in Pittsburgh and has acted around Chicago and Pittsburgh with various companies.
To find out more about the Wizards' Club of Chicago, visit www.wizardsclubofchicago.com. To see Fairman’s magic, visit www.wizardofsorts.com. |
