Magician Profile/Review - Criss Angel

For those of you who don’t know who Criss Angel is, let me describe him. He looks something like a reject from a 90’s rock band and in fact he has a band and thus obviously does like music…if yelling like a freak is what you consider music. If you want to see some photos of him, go here. This is not his claim to fame however, nor why I am writing about him. I’m writing about him as he is quite a famous magician. This might sound like an oxymoron, particularly if you don’t really pay attention to magic at all and couldn’t name a magician other than Houdini or Copperfield if your life depended on it. However Angel has done a couple or seasons of his own magic series, “Mind Freak”, and put out a few dvds and made quite a bit of money. He has also paid his performing dues and didn’t become a success overnight. So what’s so good about him, you may rightly ask? Well let me describe a couple of his tricks. On his tv show he has done stuff like put a piece of thread into his mouth and then pull the thread out of his eye….yes I said eye! As a prelude to this he had a coin signed and placed in his mouth, then apparently swallowing it, he showed some people on the street the coin moving down the inside of his arm…under his skin, where he made an incision with a knife and removed the signed coin! Other memorable effects include seemingly floating himself and others in an open area, setting himself on fire and walking on water.

He is a character that people often love or hate. Love because he does some amazing illusions and is far from the old top hat and tails magician of yesterday. Hate because he doesn't smile much and perhaps comes across as a bit of a poser. A lot of other magicians are probably just jealous of his success and might say things like, "If I had a huge budget and access to the magic constultants (yes there are magic consultants) that he has, then I could do all that stuff." That may be the case, but he is the one who has put in the effort to make it all happen. My personal view is that I enjoy the majority of the magic that he does, but don't really like the stunts that he seems to love doing. For instance the other night I was watching his show and he performed a stunt where he got into a box that had explosives on one side of it and stayed in the box while it blew up! You may be thinking that such a thing sounds like a trick, but that was not how it was billed. His idea was to feel what it was like to be as close to an explosion as possible and he did it. Personally I think it would have been better that when the box exploded, he had vanished, but no, the box went all over the place and there he was, lying curled up on the bottom of it. Love him or hate him, he has certainly done a lot to raise the profile of magic...at least in the US anyway.