Magician and comedian Murray Sawchuck has a lot in common with Superman.
His onstage patter is faster than a speeding bullet. His tricks are more powerful than a locomotive – after all, he made a 1918 steam engine vanish before a live studio audience on America’s Got Talent – and although no one has seen him leap tall buildings at a single bound, it’s probably just because no one has challenged him to do it yet. Give him time. He’ll figure it out.
A longtime Las Vegas fixture and a hugely popular YouTube prankster, Sawchuck is coming to Chestnut Hill’s historic Stagecrafters Theater on Friday, Jan. 24. The show is presented by Comic Cure, which uses “the unifying power of laughter to uplift and engage communities around important causes.”
Quite aside from his magic, Burnaby, British Columbia, native Murray Sawchuck, an eternally youthful 51, is nothing if not memorable. His tall, wiry frame is capped off by a tropical bird-like spray of white-blond hair. Oversized glasses complete the look. That look is all part of his brand, and you could argue that he’s been building it since he was 7, when he received a Siegfried and Roy magic kit from his parents, John and Arlene.
He remembers some of the tricks.
“One was where you put a coin in the top of a sealed plastic container. The coin goes from the top of the jar to the bottom when it’s completely sealed,” he recalls. “There were some card tricks. I believe there was a sponge multiplying rabbit trick, which is a classic of magicians. It was maybe five tricks, and that was it. I did it for a while as a little show for my parents. And that was that, and I put it away.”
At the time, there were other diversions. Sawchuck’s father’s family were Ukrainian, so he learned Ukrainian dancing starting at age 5 – “big red pants and those split leaps they do in the air and all that stuff” – and as he progressed through childhood, he learned accordion, saxophone and keyboards.
Then as he was 12, turning 13, a favorite uncle and aunt asked him what he wanted for Christmas. He paged through the Sears catalog and, among other things, came across a Houdini magic kit. “I thought, that looks really cool, so I wrote that on my list. And sure enough, that’s what I got,” he says. “That’s how things really got started. I was an only child, and I liked the attention. I liked the responsibility. I liked the fact that people were interested, and you could hold their attention with music or dance or something. Magic was just a parallel move – a different way to get attention on stage. I thought it was intriguing. Magic is one of those things where it looks like people are cut in half, but they’re not, or it looks like they’re floating in air, but there’s no way they could be floating. No one has that kind of power, so how is it happening?”
From that magic kit, things progressed rapidly. Sawchuck checked out a book called “Mark Wilson’s Complete Course in Magic” from the local library so many times that he considered just keeping it and paying the fine.
“It’s still one of the best books on magic you can buy,” he says. “It has words and illustrations. I’m a visual learner. If you tell me how to tie a tie over the phone, forget it. It will be the worst knot ever. But if you show me pictures, I’ll never forget it. So, that book was great. I could read ‘put this in your left hand, then move it to your right hand,’ but when I saw a visual of it, it solved everything.”
Sawchuck soon learned enough tricks that he began performing at kids’ parties for money – 50 bucks for a half hour. Up to that point, it was far from his only money-making endeavor. Starting at 11, he worked at a bakery making pie shells, did odd jobs, shoveled snow, repaired bikes, mowed lawns and had a couple of paper routes.
He quickly figured out how to translate his burgeoning knowledge of magic into one more paying gig. “There was a Commodore 64 computer at school. We could rent it out for a half hour at a time,” he recalls. “I used a program called Printshop to make flyers with tags at the bottom that you could rip off. I’d print maybe 200 at a time. I’d hang them up at rec centers where I took swimming lessons to become a lifeguard. (Yet another money-making endeavor.) Hopefully, people would call me for a party.”
They did. He was too young to drive, so his dad drove him to the parties. His mother, a seamstress, crafted his costume. “I’d do two to five parties a weekend at $50 apiece. I’d be making $300 a weekend. I got a Yellow Pages ad and a business line in my bedroom. I learned how to market myself. With the money I made, I’d buy more and better magic tricks.”
As Sawchuck became older, he came up with shows for adults as well, but when it came time to think about college, his father was insistent – magic wasn’t going to be enough to live on. “I wanted to do it for a living, but my dad was the old school way,” Sawchuck says. “You want to buy a home and have a retirement plan and live the American dream – or, whatever, the Canadian dream. So I took a degree in radio, television and broadcasting.”
Still, the dream of a career in magic wouldn’t die. When he thought about where radio and television would be likely to take him, Sawchuck envisioned doing overnight radio shows in little northern Canadian towns for loggers or Eskimos, earning maybe $800 a month. “Well, I was already making $3,500 a month doing magic shows in Vancouver. That was my turning point. I was making enough now doing what I love. But the question was, how do I get past the kids’ show thing?”
He took a chance and wrote a letter to John Whitefoot, an agent who booked acts for professional musicians in all the hotels in and around Vancouver. Much to his surprise, he heard back. Whitefoot called and offered him a job on a cruise ship from Montreal to New York. The pay was $1,100 American a week – equivalent to about $1,800 Canadian. Sawchuck was just 19.
There were just a couple of hitches.
He needed two 45-minute acts – one for the outbound journey and another for the trip back – and he needed a 15-minute routine for a welcome aboard show. “I was lucky if I had 45 minutes of material to begin with for adults, let alone two different 45-minute shows and one other 15-minute act,” Sawchuck says. “I said to myself, what am I doing?”
And the second hitch.
“I asked, when does the contract start? The agent says, you have to be in Montreal on Friday. I said pardon me, Friday? This is Tuesday.”
But the word no is not in Murray Sawchuck’s vocabulary. “I was thinking, I’ve got to make this work,” he says. “If I don’t make this work, I’m going to be doing kids’ birthday parties for the rest of my life.”
He cobbled together enough material for one 45-minute and one 15-minute routine. As for the rest, he placed a rush order with Tannen’s Magic, a well-known magicians’ resource in New York City. “I went through their catalog, and I ordered everything,” he says. “I ordered tricks that lasted four to six minutes. So I ended up ordering all this damn magic, praying to God that I could learn it quickly.”
He packed up a steamer trunk with props and tricks of all kinds along with two suitcases and, after a series of rookie transportation misadventures, found his way to the ship. And much to Sawchuck’s surprise as much as anyone else’s, he succeeded, performing from Montreal to New York without a complaint.
“When we stopped in New York, I picked up all those tricks from Tannen’s that I’d ordered. I had three days without a show. So I spent three days with no sleep, learning this magic. That was my introduction to real-life show biz,” he recalls. “I managed to fool everybody enough, I guess, to stay on the ship and not get fired. I extended on that ship five times and I stayed aboard seven and a half months. At that point I could say I was marketable, and I could do a good show. Fake it till you make it.”
Since those harrowing early days, Sawchuck has progressed steadily through the show business ranks through his trademark dogged work and relentless, unapologetic self-promotion, making his big first breakthrough with a trick involving the manipulation of compact disks.
“Everyone else was doing tricks with birds and coins and candles and handkerchiefs,” he says. “And I thought if I could do a trick with CDs, because they’re flat like cards but cool-looking, that could be really trendy. I did some competitions, won over 20 awards with it, and became a world champion. I ended up touring the world. And that really wound up putting me on the map as a magician.”
Fast forward a couple of decades. Sawchuck is living his dream, performing nightly shows in Las Vegas, wowing the studio audience on America’s Got Talent, and racking up a billion views on his YouTube channel. He’s also a fixture on Pawn Stars, Netflix, Hulu, Tubi, Masters of Illusion and Reno 911.
And now you can catch his act here in Chestnut Hill. See him Friday, Jan. 24, at The Stagecrafters Theater, 8130 Germantown Ave., starting at 7:30 p.m. (He appears the following night in Ardmore.)
