You might think that Adam Trent would find Hawaii’s quarantine on fresh fruit particularly troublesome. After all, one of the magician’s most popular tricks is to make someone’s cellphone magically appear in a honeydew melon.
Fruit inspectors, rest assured. He’s not sneaking any magic melons in.
“It will be fresh from Hawaii,” he said with a laugh. “I’ll be using the local stuff.”
Trent, who performs Saturday at Hawaii Theatre, is one of the hottest magic acts out there right now. He was a leading member of The Illusionists, a team magic act that took Broadway by storm in 2014 and subsequently had sellouts on a nationwide tour.
He stars in his own TV series on Red Bull TV, beginning in 2017, and he’s been a guest on dozens of television shows, astounding his hosts along the way – Trent pulled the cellphone trick on Matt Lauer and Ellen DeGeneres’ sidekick Twitch, with the real fun coming as they watched their cellphone get mashed up in a grinder before it reappeared, whole and in working order, in the melon.
TRENT’S ACT is a razzle-dazzle display of showmanship, blending sleight of hand with modern takes on traditional tricks like sawing someone in half: He does it to himself, rather than a lovely female assistant, using a contraption that slices and separates his torso from his legs.
There’s plenty of high-tech wizardry too. Using video technology, he’ll have a two-dimensional image, such as a deck of cards, fly across a large LED screen set up on stage. Suddenly he’ll snatch the cards out of thin air, ready to deal or use in his next trick. Trent said it is his most complicated trick.
“It’s split-second timing and it’s visuals,” he said. “There’s certain things you’re hiding and certain things you want (the audience) to see. There’s technology that’s ever-changing. All that, and then just making it entertaining and make it relatable. I’ve probably worked on that for the last seven, eight years, and it’s still evolving.
“An analogy would be like for a musician to learn a new song, they have to learn the new notes. Whereas for a magician to build a new trick, it’s like you have to build a new piano.”
TRENT HAS been interested in magic since he was just 8 years old, after seeing a David Copperfield performance on television.
“I got a book on it that same year and started reading up on it and loved it,” he said. “I started doing tricks for my parents and started doing kids’ birthday parties, and it just got bigger and bigger, slowly slowly slowly.”
Doing tricks in front of kids his own age was “certainly nerve-wracking at the time,” he said, but it probably helped prepare him for his performances today.
Despite to all the work and preparation he does, he said, as well as the slick presentation and high production values, things inevitably do go wrong.
For Trent, who relies heavily on audience participation, that can mean people not following directions.
“You’re saying, ‘Draw something on this card, and they draw it on the wrong side of the card, or they end up tearing the card – everything and anything that could possibly happen,” he said.
“There are certain things that have to happen, and there are certain things that can’t happen,” he said. “When you involve audience members, those lines between those things become blurry, because you’re dealing with somebody who’s either trying to screw things up, or maybe they just don’t know — and they accidentally do things that make you go, ‘Hoo, boy, we’re going in a whole different direction now.‘”
Trent’s shows also include plenty of comedy, dancing and music, making it “a magic show for people who don’t like magic, or people who don’t know they like magic,” he said.
One of his greatest thrills is to change someone’s mind about magic. “They’ll tell me. ‘I didn’t expect to laugh this hard, or to cry at the end of the show,’” he said.
THE MAGIC OF ADAM TRENT
>> Where: Hawaii Theatre
>> When: 8 p.m. Saturday
>> Cost: $35-$65
>> Info: hawaiitheatre.com or 528-0506
