Dennis Watkins, The Magic Parlour/Photo: Kyle Flubacker
For decades, it was Lawry’s The Prime Rib, but in March 2026, the 36,000-square-foot McCormick Mansion will be transformed into a Magic Mansion and renamed The Hand & The Eye. As a $50 million development, the big money investment venue (or as they say, “not just a venue: it’s a journey”) will be the largest in the world dedicated to a surprising art: magic.
The announcement prompted initial noise followed by long silence, with little information about the project’s content or aims. Glen Tullman, billionaire CEO of Transcarent and former Allscripts CEO, is the money behind the project, which may be considered a reincarnation of unrealized restaurant collaborations he dreamed up with David Copperfield in the 1990s.
With that fifty-million-dollar confidence, I wondered why. Why Chicago for a new magic venue, and could it work? When I tried to find out from the wizard himself, I was told The Hand & The Eye team “don’t want press at this time” beyond the Chicago Tribune’s announcement exclusive. Jeff Kaylor, the project’s head magician, is quoted in that announcement saying performers will be a blend of resident magicians and “world-class special guests” brought into the city, begging the question of whether there will be a bar to entry for Chicago magicians. Tullman and troupe are keeping their Magic McMansion under wraps for now, and it appears that they expect to take the magic scene by storm without much assistance from successful local magicians who, as I found out, are by and large not involved.
The Hand & The Eye makes a lot of claims—not the least of which is that it will instigate a “Chicago Magic Renaissance.” As Kaylor implied in the press release, The Hand & The Eye intends to “bring back” a golden age of Chicago magic. Perhaps this is an overstatement for effect, but even so, that understanding of the scene doesn’t capture the magic renaissance that Chicago is already experiencing without a grand investor. Our moment is just part of the energy magicians have been building for more than two decades, an energy inherited from Chicago’s groundbreaking history as a magician’s city.
Benjamin Barnes at Chicago’s Magic Lounge/Photo: Anjali Pinto
Joey Cranford, purveyor of the Magic Lounge, became interested in magic around 2010. Since then, he’s been a magic historian, and his work with the Magic Lounge has revived Chicago-style close-up magic, the unique blend of sleight-of-hand, humor and down-to-earth humanity invented here.
Cranford says Chicago’s most recent magic renaissance died in the late 1990s.
Magic became popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s as vaudeville acts peaked. Big names like Harry Houdini, Harry Blackstone, Howard Thurston and Adelaide Hermann traveled the United States, bringing magic to the masses. In “Chicago Magic: A History of Stagecraft and Spectacle” (2013), David Witter says live magic and magic acts rivaled big bands in terms of popularity.
Johnny Paul
Chicago’s first golden age of magic followed vaudeville’s prime, beginning around the 1930s and stretching through the 1960s. Johnny Paul and Matt Schulien, who was friends with Harry Blackstone, first made a name for Chicago-style magic when they introduced close-up tricks to patrons of Schulien’s bar, which later became O’Donovan’s. The pair, now legends to many, would wow patrons with card tricks and other sleight-of-hand at their tables and from behind the bar.
There are histories of Chicago-style magic, including Bill Weimer’s “Now You See Them, Now You Don’t: My Life in the Magic Bars of Chicago.” But according to Cranford, most of Chicago’s magic history is written in the margins of practical magician’s handbooks as well as teaching tools like videos such as “Learn Magic with Johnny Paul.” “I only bought the videos because he’s going to talk about history between the tricks, I know it,” Cranford says. “He ended up talking about how he and Matt Schulien were the first two to do it. It’s not even in a book.’”
Matt Schulien performing at Schulien’s, 1800 N. Halsted, 1945
By the 1960s, there were upwards of fourteen distinct magic bars in the city, according to the Chicago Magic Lounge website, including Schulien’s, Johnny Paul’s Magic Lounge, New York Lounge, Little Bit O’ Magic, The Ivanhoe, Mr. C’s Magic Lounge, Ryan’s Magic Tap and Houdini’s Pub and Pizza, along with dozens of prop-building and trinket magic shops. The Chicago Magic Round Table, founded in 1929, convened regularly until some time in the 1960s. By the end of the century, these all died out. Most magic performance was then in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Performance never left the city though. Chicago’s Round Table returned briefly in the 2000s before returning underground. There were still small showcases, including at the Uptown Underground and Stage 773. Ash’s Magic Shop and Magic, Inc., formerly known as the Ireland Magic Company, founded in 1926, remained gathering places for magicians. Magic, Inc., still open and now North America’s oldest continually operating brick-and-mortar magic store, hosted a somewhat unofficial fraternity of magicians called the Session Club. Ashod “Mr. Ash” Baboorian ran his shop for more than fifty years before passing in 2020. Magic as a performance art remained, though understated, and magicians like Cranford, Aaron Rabkin, Dennis Watkins and Dr. Ricardo Rosenkranz of the Rhapsody Theater brought it further into the light. And a growing public appetite for performances, including Watkins’ Magic Parlour opening in 2010 and the Magic Lounge in 2017, made magicians public figures once more.
At the time Cranford began his magic journey in 2001, the city’s magic scene was relegated to one-off performances and monthly variety series with a few magicians. Cranford saw the gap and resolved to build a Chicago home for magic. What began as a regular series became the Chicago Magic Lounge, a venue complete with a bar for close-up magic, a 120-seat cabaret theater and a secondary venue for aftershows. The Chicago Magic Round Table has reconstituted in that space, and Cranford says the lounge sees more than 150 performers a year. The Magic Lounge’s faux laundromat speakeasy entrance (with two more hidden entrances to follow) generates wonder, even for those uninitiated in magic shows, as it did in a viral TikTok video. A revolving door of magicians keeps the space filled, all with unique approaches but with what Cranford describes as a common interest in gathering as a group. It’s such a success that Weimer even revised his 2014 history to include the Chicago Magic Lounge on its cover.
Aaron Rabkin, Trickery Chicago/Photo: Peter Serocki
Aaron Rabkin, sole proprietor and solo performer at Trickery Chicago, isn’t sure the magic really died so much as moved around, and he doesn’t share Cranford’s interest in joining a magicians’ congregation. Quite the opposite, actually: he says he hates magicians. “Oh, yeah, like, truly,” he says. “The last thing I would ever want to do is hang out with a magician. They’re losers with an ego because they can do a card trick. I’m like, guys, there’s more to life.” He qualifies that he does like individuals and that magic, like other solitary arts, creates a need for community. But as a group? They can be navel-gazers.
Rabkin came up in Los Angeles around other magicians while performing as a teen at the famous Magic Castle. Soon after that he disavowed magic and moved away. He wanted to do anything other than magic to escape his child-star-like past, but while busking in the streets of Saratoga Springs, New York, magic found him and brought him back to the trade. Rabkin moved to Chicago in 2015 and Trickery officially opened two years later, providing a unique counterpoint to the existing “serious magic shows.”
Rabkin talks about magic more as a trade than an art, which is different from what others told me: magic is a practice to integrate into performance, but not a lifestyle. “If someone asked me what do you do for a living, I wouldn’t even say I’m a magician,” he says. “I don’t like using that term because it comes with so much baggage. If you take the words magician and magic, I mean, these are supernatural powers. There’s nothing supernatural about finding a card. These people who basically do poker demonstrations are acting like a wizard came down and gave them some sorcery to find the aces.”
Trickery’s been around longer than the Magic Lounge and has remained a solo commercial venture. Of course, Trickery is partly a magic show and is billed as such, but Rabkin describes it to me as a comedy show with magic. “There’s a lot of cases where magic can be incorporated into a stage production,” he says. “I actually think magic functions better in a setting when you’re not expecting it.” He also thinks magic’s better performed by non-magicians because they have other capacities for performance and other tools. Rather than putting on a show that’s about magic, they’re adept at other forms of entertainment that often make their way into magic shows. Rabkin prefers more sophisticated jokes to corny magic puns. “Trickery’s still an excellent magic show,” he says. “It’s a show for people who do or do not like the idea of going to a magic show.”
Rabkin’s alternative magic show hints at the variety of performances Chicago offers and can incubate, which range from the traditional to the experimental, with all kinds of bar magic in between. “I’m inspired by anything but a magic show,” Rabkin says, “and yet magicians just want to go see other magicians. I think it becomes very insular in its thinking. And that’s where art goes to die.” The solo venture, though—a one-man show with one employee—sounds a bit lonely, even if successful. “My social life is that I’m other people’s social life,” Rabkin says, laughing.
Dennis Watkins, The Magic Parlour/Photo: Kyle Flubacker
For Dennis Watkins, magic didn’t die so much as dramatically change. Watkins has run the Magic Parlour in Chicago since 2010, first in the basement of the Chopin Theatre, then for more than a decade at Palmer House, and now in a dedicated venue beneath Petterino’s that’s affiliated with the Goodman Theatre. He’s a staple: Joey Cranford says he’s been friends with Watkins for years and they sometimes laughingly call themselves the “Magic Mob Bosses” of Chicago. “He had South Side, I got North Side,” he laughs.
Watkins chats animatedly about the viability of magic and theater at the table where, later that night, he slides two decks of cards in patterns that draw actual gasps. The atmosphere of the Magic Parlour is one of polished walnut and cocktail attire. Watkins wears black-tie—where my brain goes when picturing a “magician’s uniform”—but there isn’t a stuffy air. The pomp and razzle-dazzle of the Magic Parlour is about creating a luxurious evening out, a magical experience, for those who want to pay for it.
Dennis Watkins remembers that when he arrived on the scene in 2001, his idols like Eugene Burger, who died in 2017, were performing but not for the general public. “We were serving a lot of corporate audiences and a lot of private clients and a lot of private events. And because of that, you know, magicians were doing great here.” Watkins still serves private groups, but now there’s a popular appetite for magic. In the last ten years, he’s also seen magic boom in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Nashville and other cities.
During the pandemic, when other performance arts such as theater suffered, magic became even more viable. Watkins lost House Theatre during that time, a company he cofounded, but he performed magic on Zoom throughout quarantine, as did Magic Lounge magicians. “During the pandemic, every magician I know was online performing show after show after show,” he says. Why? “It was like an honest-to-god community experience,” and people needed what magic could provide. “There are so many art forms that would never possibly succeed in this environment. But as long as we can see each other’s faces, I can do some crazy mind-reading stuff.” Watkins never saw a dip in his attendance or sales numbers.
“Now,” Watkins says, “you’ve got this beautiful renaissance of magic.”
“Ten years ago, if I were to ask a room full of grown-ups what they think of, what they picture, when they imagine a magician, it was probably one of two things: it was David Copperfield, or it was the guy who did their kid’s birthday party, and there was nothing in between. But YouTube, ‘America’s Got Talent,’ ‘Penn & Teller: Fool Us,’ now people are saying, oh, magicians can be interesting. This artist, this magician, is different than this one—it’s like comedians or singers, they’re different voices and different kinds of artists doing different kinds of work. And that makes the whole thing more accessible and more interesting to people because they discover that there’s something that they can relate to differently.”
It might be that social media and viral videos like the Magic Lounge’s speakeasy reveal have made magic more successful than ever. Certainly, Netflix series like Justin Willman’s “Magic for Humans,” Derek Delgaudio’s drama-documentary “In & Of Itself” and stage productions like “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” or “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” all of which incorporate magic, are growing in popularity.
Aaron Rabkin, Trickery Chicago/Photo: Del Nakamura
It might be, as Rabkin puts it, that audiences want more curated and personal outings. Audiences love to get to know an artist, and as Watkins put it, magic puts the artist right in front of you—especially in a small venue or on Zoom, when you can talk to them. “We all want to go to the Eras Tour concert, and we want five minutes with Taylor Swift,” Watkins says. “When you go to the Magic Lounge, you’ve got a magician standing around at your table talking to you doing a trick, and literally just for you. You’re probably singing along with Taylor Swift, but your voice doesn’t carry any moment of that concert. But in this show, in a magic show, it can.”
Rabkin feels that experiential entertainment like circus and variety arts has been on the rise in the last decade or so in part because of how frequently people document their lives in photos and on social media. “You need something pretty powerful to yank a Gen-Zer’s attention from their phone,” he says.
Cranford believes that our shared moment gives us reasons to seek out magic. “I think the more advanced our technology goes, the more there’s a desire to return to an analog world,” he says. He gestures at his phone: “With what you can do with this thing, you know, why is anything a miracle? There’s something so pure about watching a coin vanish while you’re staring at it. Your phone can’t find your card in a deck of cards. To be fooled is just such a pure thing. We want to take you back to an era when it was fun to be fooled, before I could know anything immediately.” Watkins says something similar: “Spaces like this encourage you to be like, oh, wait, I can’t do this with my phone. There’s still things that are human.”
As Watkins puts it, magic can stimulate viscerally or intellectually, serving an audience that’s looking for “gasps and giggles and everything in between.” He thinks it’s special, and he feels that part of the importance of magic is the social agreement the show produces—another division between his application of the trade and Rabkin’s disdain for the sorcery of it all.
If magic is all of the things these practitioners claim, is it enough to enliven it for the next generation? Can it grow even further to invite more play and experimentation, more diversity, more passion and sharing, and to further engage us on human levels where machines can’t join us?
“Magic is a weird art,” says Watkins. “It’s an art that lives and breathes on the preservation of an illusion. There’s a weird compact between me and you that we’re gonna have that’s like, okay, so you know magic, it’s not real. I know magic, it’s not real. But for ninety minutes, let’s just be grown-up and pretend magic is real. And then we all go do that for ninety minutes. And if we do it well, it’s fun. And it’s light and it’s mysterious, and you experience a little bit of wonder.”
Still, Watkins tells me with some horror, “There’s actually a guy in the Czech Republic who’s found a way to make ChatGPT perform some really cool card tricks.”
Ryan Plunkett, with his “Old Fashioned Magic” at the Magic Lounge
I spend an evening in the Magic Lounge’s art deco’d-out cabaret theater watching the latest young magician to come up through their communal ranks: Ryan Plunkett, with his “Old Fashioned Magic.” I find it hard not to enjoy the tableside charm and variety of the place, not to mention the magic books, posters and other artifacts scattered about.
Plunkett, along with many other curious magicians, was in the first show Cranford produced at the Magic Lounge. “I knew like seven magicians at the time and thought, that’s a lot of magicians,” Cranford says, laughing. Plunkett introduced himself to Cranford after the show, “and he showed me a trick and it fooled me so bad I immediately hired him.” Plunkett’s been working the tables at the Magic Lounge ever since. He helped Cranford book talent, even make a logo. Since then, he’s written several magic books, has this touring solo show, and plays venues including the Magic Castle. “He’s an incredible success story,” Cranford says, beaming, and he hopes that other magicians from the Magic Lounge both leave to perform and come home to Chicago. “Ryan was just out of town doing that thing where he pops his show up in different markets, and he texted me the other day on his way in saying, ‘I’m home.’”
Most magicians in the city agree that the magic renaissance is already here, though they differ on why and how long that’s been building. There’s no need for an outside eye (or hand) to instigate a new era.
When considering “why Chicago?” Cranford says Los Angeles is more about film and New York is more about theater, “but Chicago, for some reason, has opportunities that make [magic] more accessible. There are almost roadmaps for success in Chicago.” Cranford first moved here to further his improv career, and treated training at The Second City a bit like going to grad school. His improv experience informed his vision of the Magic Lounge. “You know, you worked all the clubs, you all hung out at the same places, and all of the work was lifted up by being a strong community. And so that made the work better. But when I saw these magicians, I said, where’s your comedy club? Like, where do you hang out?”
Both the improv and theater scenes in Chicago have pathways that can feel friendly and communal, and while it would be wrong to say there’s no competition, there is a spirit of camaraderie or at least commiseration in experimentation and growth. “The standoffish world is not for us,” Cranford says. “We’re all about inclusiveness.” In a sense, the Chicago storefront theater scene and the improv and standup scenes kept the city warm for magic’s resurgence. As with Watkins, whose show began as a side project to House Theatre, or Rabkin, who began Trickery as a storefront theater in Boystown, the booming performance scene made small-scale showbiz a viable option for magicians.
Chicago magicians are much more professionalized these days, and there are clearer paths to making a living. “Performers are ready to invest more in their art now because they can have a full-time job doing their art,” says Cranford. “We have people that work five to six days a week doing their magic.” Rabkin, too, has seen the daily production model work for Trickery, and none of these magicians seem to feel the sting of sales dip when another show rolls into town.
House Theatre’s “Death and Harry Houdini”
Aaron Rabkin’s polemic against magicians dovetails neatly with Dennis Watkins’ desire to extend magic into plays as he did with House Theatre. House’s “Death and Harry Houdini,” their very first production, successfully remounted several times over the course of the theater company’s lifespan, put magic front-and-center and was, for all intents and purposes, a play. Watkins played Houdini in the production, which featured the water-torture cell escape (which I vividly remember watching and worrying over, as I believe the night I saw the show he was under a little too long). They’re not so different, these drives to put on a “show with magic” and make magic a practical effect among other effects. This is one arena magic expands into when innovation is high, especially in Chicago with its lively performance scenes. Watkins teases me by saying he’s reconceiving House Theatre’s “The Magnificents” in the coming months, giving me hope for further innovative productions staging magic.
Still, no one venue or magician can hold the keys to the kingdom of magic, and no one would stop The Hand & The Eye from coming. It’s easy to see why a big-money venture like that would capitalize on Chicago’s magic scene. It’s going to be an expensive ticket, and for many, it won’t be at the top of the priority list—there’s a membership option and dress codes, like with Watkins, whose ticket is already up there. But as Watkins puts it, “You know, my project is not capitalized for $50 million. So it’s easy to go, does Walmart put me, the mom-and-pop shop, out of business?”
A $50 million project can do a lot that smaller venues just can’t do, but it doesn’t feel like the others are going anywhere. “I bet it will probably be a much more elaborate stage venue, so that’ll be cool,” Rabkin says of The Hand & The Eye—but he doesn’t think they have a clear proof-of-concept. “The guy who’s opening it, he must be some super-wealthy guy who apparently just loves magic. I don’t think he even cares if it makes money because the thing is, it makes no business sense.”
Watkins continues his diagnosis: “It seems like the likely outcome is that we build more audience for magic. Chicago’s a very big city. I have sixty-four seats.” The Hand & The Eye, alternatively, will have seven theater spaces, not to mention a few restaurants, to fill. The Magic Castle is similar, says the magicians I’ve talked to, in that its multiple small spaces can be full of dozens of magicians any given night. “Starting from zero is, I think, the challenge,” Rabkin says. “But somebody clearly thinks that magic is so hot that you just throw a bunch of money at it.”
I started out thinking that new competition like The Hand & The Eye would be a huge blow to the storefront magic scene. But magic isn’t just “content”; it’s a trade, or an art, or an experience, and the productions employing it are as infinite as with any other medium. There’s room for as many kinds of performance as there are storefronts, living rooms and basements in all of Chicago.
“One of the reasons that Chicago’s able to house all this magic is because I don’t know of any two projects that feel like they’re the same to me,” Watkins says. “This magic marketplace in Chicago grew not out of a private club for magic nerds, but out of real people who were buying tickets for their Friday night out—because magic was talking to a public, real audience. It was in a bar and they were like, whoa.”
Published in the print edition of the September 2025 issue, with the headline “Magic City: Chicago in the New Golden Age.”
