Magician casts an entertaining spell

Matthew Stewart performs a trick with partner Will Zhang. Photos submitted

By Tom Victoria

For Matthew Stewart, every day is magic. He’s an illusionist and mentalist.

The Canadian prestidigitator explained what magic means to him.

“Magic isn't necessarily about the tricks or the illusions,” he said. “It's more about the experience. If you make somebody have a great time, that is a magical moment. If it's something people remember for the rest of their life, that is a magical moment. Magic is about the moment, not necessarily what they're seeing.”

Matthew, 30, of Ontario said magic is created with multiple components.

“There's a lot of tools that go into an illusion,” he said. “When you're seeing an optical illusion, there's so many different ideas and thought processes that go into creating what you see. There's a lot of thought behind it, a lot of different tools, a lot of different techniques that blend together to create the illusion. It could be psychology, human behavior as well as techniques, sleight of hand that all blend together to create what you're seeing.”

Matthew compared magic to another skill.

“Magic in a lot of ways is like juggling,” he said. “But with juggling, people see the technique more. With magic, it's the technique that they don't see that makes it as impressive as what people see in a juggler.”

Matthew has a variety of tricks up his sleeve.

“I mix it up based on my interests,” he said. “I love mentalism. I'd say that's my favorite kind. But the grand illusions we've done, I've done everything from card magic. It just depends what catches my interest at that moment. I like to be diverse in it and just play around a lot. I like to practice what excites me. That's the best way to stay passionate about something.”

Matthew is known for different tricks depending on who you ask.

“Depends who you are,” he said. “You wear a different hat with your friends. You wear a different hat with your family. You wear a different hat when it comes to business. For business, I was mostly known for stage mentalism and illusion. Whereas, when it comes to friends and family, they might know me more for card magic, just small stuff to entertain them. They're aware of the shows and everything, but it's a separate life.”

Matthew’s grand finale of a performance also depends on the audience.

“If I'm doing close up magic with friends and family, I might end by making a card appear in my mouth or make a card go through a window,” he said. “Sometimes, you try and make variations of it, make it appear inside of a clock, try and change things up.”

Matthew has other specialties on stage.

“When it comes to grand illusions, there's one called the Fire Spiker where the assistants go in, they vanish,” he said. “Then multiple assistants appear when you put a big fire spike through.”

Matthew also likes to finish with prognostication.

“When doing mentalism, I would end on a strong prediction,” he said. “I love doing the mindreading stuff throughout the show and then ending with a really strong prediction. I've done it where you have people think of numbers. At the end, it turns out that's a number on everyone's coaster or something like that. I like to try and involve the audience when I can as well.”

Matthew said some stereotypical magic tricks such as sawing the woman in half are done.

“A lot of it is because people grew up with them and they love them,” he said. “A big part of it is also for business reasons. It's a selling point. If you market that, it's something people will bite on. It's what the audience wants.”

However, Matthew said some famous tricks aren’t popular with magicians.

“A lot of magicians don't necessarily pull rabbits out of hats,” he said. “Modern magicians don't like the idea of pulling rabbits out of hats. But if you're doing kids’ birthday parties, it's a huge selling point. People want that. A lot of it's business driven for the classics. It makes people happy, so I think it's great.”

Matthew explained incorporating animals into a magic act takes some work.

“You'd want to practice with the animal,” he said. “You want to do dress rehearsals and do everything properly to be able to practice. And you have to make sure you're taking really good care of the animal. I always hope when people are working with animals, they're doing that.”

Matthew prefers to not take the four-legged assistant route.

“I don't generally work with animals because they come with the responsibility of having to take care of everything,” he said. “I would obviously take great care of an animal if I had one, but it's also the audience. I used to do a routine with a goldfish where we'd make the goldfish appear in a cup of water. We had one audience member come up, take the glass and drink the goldfish, which caught us off guard.”

Matthew also avoids certain artifices.

“There's certain ideas I would stay away from,” he said. “For example, there's a routine where you put the spike under the cups, you put your hand over, and you ask the audience to select which cups you crush after mixing them up. I've seen magicians do it where they use the spectator's hand. I would never magic that. That would put the spectator in danger or make them feel like they are in danger themselves.”

Matthew would only place one person in a potentially unsafe scenario.

“If I'm doing something dangerous, it would be me,” he said. “The performer takes all of the risk in that sense.”

Matthew rather do something amusing with an audience member.

“If I was gonna do something with them, it'd be something fun,” he said. “It wouldn't be something where they could get hurt. Maybe it's like, oh, I can't borrow your money. And then they might think for a moment their money's gone. But I'd always give it back to them as well. In a lot of ways, magicians are some of the most honest people, because we're the only people who might steal your watch and then give it back to you.”

Matthew doesn’t favor absconding with folks’ belongings even for a brief spell, though.

“I don't like the idea of actually taking things from people,” he said. “I just was interested in the skill. When I was practicing, I actually had a pretty scary situation happen when I used to busk. I pickpocketed something from someone by accident that I shouldn't have. Since then, I stopped doing it. They didn't notice. I just put it right back.”

Matthew said such tricks require physical contact.

“There's different ways when creating the illusion,” he said. “If you're pickpocketing yourself, it's obviously a brief moment where you do need to touch the person. If you're wanting to go for the illusion where you're not near them, you can either do it methodically where you choose the moment where you pick way earlier, then you do the big reveal later. It creates the illusion of you not being near them. Or you could work with another friend who's a pickpocket as well.”

Matthew said there’s a bigger downside than upside to revealing the secrets to tricks and illusions, such as done by the infamous Masked Magician (later revealed to be Val Valentino).

“I see what he was claiming he was going for,” he said. “I don't necessarily think that's why he really did it. He wanted the payout. I get the idea of forcing other magicians to innovate, but at the same time, you're selling out a lot of people's livelihoods by revealing those things. A lot of the classics are marketable and people enjoy them. That's why magicians do them.”

Matthew said magicians are inherently inventive.

“A lot of them are already pretty innovative if they've been in it long enough to be doing those types of routines,” he said. “A regular civilian isn't going to be doing walking through the Great Wall of China or something like that. There was no point in revealing that if he did.” 

Matthew pointed out magicians such as Penn & Teller can reveal some secrets without causing damage.

“They're heavily respected magicians, but they also reveal a lot of secrets,” he said. “A lot of it is their original things and they do it. But they're not out there doing things that are going to affect other magicians’ careers. Even their cups and balls, you're just mesmerized as they're explaining it, what they're doing. They have a purpose in it. It's almost like they're revealing the juggling side of it. A lot of times in their exposure, they're revealing how impressive it actually is. They're showing the tech, the skill behind it.”

Matthew explained fans favor some magicians over others (such as a 1970s viewer possibly liking Doug Henning’s personality and presentation over David Copperfield’s) due to personal taste.

“I look at magic like music where there's different genres,” he said. “Some people prefer country, some people prefer rock, but there's a lot of the same techniques and elements that go into them. They just make different sounds, but they're still using chords, still writing choruses and verses. A lot of the same techniques are used. They're just creating different sounds, different looks, different images. It depends what style you gravitate towards. Some people will say they don't like magic, but then they'll go watch Criss Angel or David Blaine.”

Matthew believes every magician should be held in esteem.

“Anyone who can get on stage and do anything has already accomplished one of the most common fears in the world,” he said. “Anyone who gets on stage deserves respect right there. Even if they're not very good, then there's nowhere to go but up. They can only learn. They can only improve over time. They deserve the chance to get better.”

Matthew said performers can be innovative, but the roots of all of their tricks are the same.

“There's only seven magic effects when it comes to vanishing, appearances, all that,” he said.

Matthew cited the seven as appearance/vanish, levitation/suspension, penetration, prediction, restoration, transformation and transposition.

“Could be eight if you count appearance/vanish as separate points,” he said.

Matthew said there’s only one reason to dislike a magician.

“It comes down to their humanity,” he said. “If they're just a rude person in general, that would make me lose a little respect. But as a performance, I would never say I don't like someone or their style even if they're not my preference.”

During an interview, Penn pointed out the difference between a performer such as Angel using camera tricks to a magic trick not relying on devices. Matthew said even if a performer employs effects created by equipment for a television, there still was effort involved.

“I'd say he definitely couldn't do everything on stage that he was doing in front of the camera,” he said. “I'm not a fan of camera tricks. I don't like them. But to run a weekly TV special like that and constantly be coming up with original, unique content, you can't be doing the same things over and over again. It takes a long time to learn something, to work on something new. He had a team of consultants with him, so I don't necessarily blame him for the camera tricks.”

The magic duo appear to impale assistant Stephanie Bensette.

Matthew said the time to learn a new trick varies.

“Everyone moves at their own pace,” he said. “In a lot of ways, I like working on them slower. Sometimes, people will learn it quick, but they might have bad habits. Whereas, trying to learn it slower can sometimes help build better habits.”

Matthew has traveled the globe to perform.

“Me and my business partner Will (Zhang) traveled as far as China,” he said. “Guangzhou, China. We went to L.A. We've traveled all over the place. We've gone into Singapore.”

Matthew said Las Vegas isn’t necessarily the go-to place for magic acts anymore.

“Siegfried & Roy helped build Vegas to what it is,” he said. “But it's getting competitive because now music stars are starting to go there and starting to build residences. There's more competition.”

Matthew said magicians compare notes before performing their acts in front of the same audience.

“You want to see what crossover there might be so the audience isn't seeing the same thing,” he said. “You want to be able to adjust your acts. It's good to know what to expect so you're not doing things that look too similar. Sometimes, the act can be completely different, but still look the same. If you're on a set with a whole bunch of magicians and everyone's doing cards, it's bad even if they're completely different tricks.”

Matthew recalled the first magician he saw as a kid in sixth grade.

“David Acer on the show Mystery Hunters,” he said. “That's where I learned my first trick. I talked to him on YouTube actually, and he was so kind. I told him about that and he actually was kind enough to send an autograph poster and DVD because that show meant a lot to me and my mom. I told him how much the show meant to me because I'm fascinated by mystery.”

Matthew met Acer in person years later.

“I got to meet him at a convention,” he said. “He was so kind then, too.”

Matthew eventually got the bug to practice magic.

“When I was in elementary school, I wasn't the most popular kid,” he said. “My mom was trying to find ways for me to get into things. She would sign me up for tennis lessons. I love tennis. She kept doing all these things and she saw that I like practicing the coin trick. I ended up getting books. Then I started going to the library all the time.”

Magic became the avenue for Matthew to make new friends.

“As I got better at magic, it was a way to open up to people,” he said. “I remember the first day of high school. I was shuffling cards on the bus and people were fascinated by it. And then I started performing. It was a great way to open up and have a reason to talk to people because I wasn't sure how to do that because I always felt like people didn't want to talk to me.”

Matthew enjoyed being able to entertain others.

“Once people started coming to me, it was a different thing,” he said. “I wasn't sure how to handle it or if people were being genuine. But I liked how it made people feel. I liked how it made people laugh and people seemed to enjoy it. So I wanted to keep doing it.”

Matthew went from teaching himself to learning from pros.

“When I started out, I was mostly self-taught,” he said. “I was learning the basics from the books I could find at the library. When my mom passed away when I was in high school, my dad ended up sending me to a performance camp I wanted to go to as a way to try and make me feel better. He knew I really wanted to go to that. It was called Sorcerer Safari. They had world class magicians there. They've had Sean Farquhar. You learn from consultants, from people like Criss Angel and David Blaine. You were in great company.”

Matthew learned the skills of the trade.

“They had workshops,” he said. “You might have juggling classes. You might have card magic classes. When you sign up, you choose your level: beginner, intermediate, advanced. It was cool because I used to be a big fan of Wayne Houchin when I was younger. And then when I was pulling up the first time on the bus and he was just standing right there, it was just such a cool experience.”

Matthew started doing magic in public.

“As I was learning things, I would start performing for family to build up the confidence,” he said. “Then I started doing David Blaine, Criss Angel. It's literally the street magic stuff at first. And then I started busking, doing street shows. I'd use it to practice things like juggling. I started off not very good, but as I was doing it, people were tipping me as I was learning.”

Matthew transitioned to the stage.

“As I progressed, some friends and I, we started turning our busking acts into stage shows,” he said. “We started a stage show called Outside In, because we're bringing our outside acts to the indoors and gave us opportunities to start working on more parlor and stage-type stuff.”

Matthew advanced to his first official magic act.

“One of the friends I met from the magic camp, Will, reached out to me,” he said. “He was wanting to start a duo, which we ended up doing because he liked how our personalities clashed. I was more the calm, reserved type. He was more the outgoing, energetic guy, so like a Penn & Teller thing.”

Matthew and Will do the Slicer trick.

Matthew’s career went up from there.

“We had that vision, which was pretty cool, and we ended up doing that,” he said. “We still do shows together as well. Then we got into the grand illusions and everything through that. It was a pretty cool experience. The shows just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger from there.”

Matthew said there are pros and cons to working as part of a duo.

“Obviously, it cuts your performance time,” he said. “If you're trying to kill an hour, you have to worry about less material yourself. In a lot of ways, you're still a part of their act, too. You still need to be interacting. But also that's the other thing is when you're working with other people, you need to be able to synergize. It takes a lot of working together to be able to build that. You need to spend a lot of time together, need to be working together a lot.”

Matthew said a joint act needs people to be on the same page.

“When you're working on a show, everyone has different ideas, different visions,” he said. “You need to be able to collaborate and be able to listen to each other as well. It's more difficult because you have a vision of a show in your head. They have a vision of a show in their head and sometimes those contradict. It's more challenging. In a lot of ways it's easier. It just depends what criteria you're looking at.”

Matthew learned early on in high school to improvise during live performances when needed.

“The one I'm thinking of, I completely bombed it,” he said. “I was working so hard on something, but when I got on stage, I got a little nervous and I bombed it a bit. I just pulled out some rubber bands at the end and did something with rubber bands on stage where nobody could see the rubber bands.”

Matthew also worked for businesses, walking around to entertain patrons.

“I was doing some restaurant work,” he said. “But when I was a kid, like early high school, I was doing it just for tips, but I was doing it every day for tips. And then I started getting hired for some walk-around stuff. This is before I was even on stage. I would try and entertain them before they eat.”

Matthew even worked in a place most teens couldn’t.

“When I was 14, I was working at a bar so I obviously couldn't drink or anything,” he said. “They let me stay after hours. They knew I wasn't going to do anything. If anyone messed with me, they would get kicked out, which I thought was pretty cool. Some athletic guy, when I was just taking a break eating some pizza, he came and shoved me off the stool. This 80-year-old manager came, picked him up and threw him outside. It was crazy.”

Matthew would like to be part of folks’ pleasurable memories.

“I used to perform at a flea market as one of their buskers,” he said. “There was this one family, they had a kid that I did some magic for. A couple years later, they came back. They said they came back to Canada, they're from the UK just to see me. The fact that they had a memory like that was pretty amazing. If I can just be a happy moment in somebody's memories in any way, any happy moment, doesn't even have to be magic, that's pretty cool if I did something to make their lives better in some way.”

Matthew initially wasn’t sold on posting much magic on social media.

“I like to keep quiet and just be doing stuff behind the scenes,” he said. “But now I'm trying to have more fun with social media. Trying to just post more online and do it for fun. It's something that might make people happy. I've had people telling me they're enjoying that I'm posting more, so I'm trying to keep up with it.”

Magicians have always been a staple throughout fiction. Mandrake the Magician started as a newspaper comic strip character in 1934. Comic book characters from the surge of the late 1930s and early 1940s that introduced Superman and Batman also included Zatara, the magician who uttered his spells in reverse.

In television, villains periodically were magicians. In the Wild Wild West, U.S. Secret Service Agent James West, played by Robert Conrad, foiled Don Rickles’ insidious Asmodeus and Victor Buono’s verbose dandy Count Carlos Manzeppi in different seasons.

Magicians also have been TV good guys, including Leonard Nimoy as The Great Paris in Mission: Impossible and Bill Bixby as Tony Blake in The Magician, a prestidigitator playing detective. Bixby, more renowned for My Favorite Martian and The Incredible Hulk, took the extra step of learning how to do magic.

Matthew commended Bixby for making the extra effort to perform magic himself.

“He must have had a passion for it to be able to pick it up so quickly,” he said.

More recent depictions include cinema’s Now You See Me with Jesse Eisenberg portraying J. Daniel Atlas. Matthew said fictional depictions of magicians can have negative connotations.

“A lot of it is personality-based,” he said. “For example, a lot of it is magicians still being represented as the cheesy rabbit out of a hat with an awkward script or as a sneaky conman out to steal from and manipulate people. Of course, I don’t see magicians in real life from either of those lenses, but both of those do exist in real life, too.”

Some actual magic acts aren’t as entertaining as others. Matthew said magicians need to have two traits.

“I appreciate anyone able to get up on stage in front of people, but less than stellar acts can leave a client to lump in all magicians in with them,” he said. “The most important things about magic or in any form of entertainment really are to be likeable and entertaining. If you’re likeable, it’s easier for them to want to come into your world instead of challenging it. You want them to root for you and to join you, not be confrontational.”

Matthew said they key in accomplishing lies in the magician’s style.

“A large part of being likeable and entertaining is more in the presentation of the tricks more so than the tricks themselves,” he said. “At the end of the day, the tricks are tools to be even more entertaining.”

Matthew said some parts of the magic act such as the magic wand have gone away.

“The whole point of the wand really was just for attention, distraction,” he said. “Instead of one, they might use a pencil to make the coin disappear, modernized it.”

Although the magic wand may have become passe in magic, Matthew said one thing has remained crucial in the field.

“The most common one would be a deck of cards,” he said. “It's how most magicians start. For younger kids, a magic kit would be a great tool because they get to experiment with different things.”

Matthew will let people in on some secrets.

“I do have some simple things to teach people,” he said. “I like when people are genuinely interested in things. That's one thing I like about magic, too. It's great when the audience feels like they learned something and they enjoyed learning it. It's not like they're being lectured. They're learning something as part of the show. I'd show them something simple, but it's still visual, so it's impressive. They're excited to learn it and they can show their friends. It's a memory, hopefully something they'll remember the rest of their lives.”

However, Matthew won’t divulge the key to many acts of magic to anyone including friends and family.

“The reason I don't reveal it is because it's more fun not knowing,” he said. “If I tell you this, you're not going to enjoy it anymore.”

Matthew social media moniker is magicacematt.

“The username I've used for years, magicacematt was started by some friends who made a joke in grade six about calling me Magic Ace Matt,” he said. “I just made that my YouTube channel. And since then it's been my social media thing. I mostly go by my name but if I'm making a social media handle, it usually ends up being magicacematt.”

Matthew dispensed advice to aspiring magicians.

“The library and books are a great way to learn,” he said. “It is great to learn from a magician who knows what they're doing. When you're starting out, don't be afraid to perform. You might not be great at first. The more you do it, you can only get better over time and grow that confidence. Practice as much as you can before you're doing something. Make sure you put the effort into it before you show it to people. But if it doesn't go perfect, that's okay. You only get better from there.”

Matthew said stage fright can be overcome.

“The stage fright's inevitable,” he said. “You'll find once you're on stage and once you're doing it, a lot of that stage fright goes away in the moment. You're nervous right up until you get on stage. But once you go out there, the lights are so blinding you can't really see everyone. If you're bringing an audience member up, you start interacting with them more and it feels more personal, which brings you at ease. Part of it's also fake it until you make it. As long as you rehearse being confident, practice what you're going to say, practice what your opener is going to be, and you've gone through the rehearsals, once you're up there, you'll relax and let your shoulders go.”

Matthew said errors often can go undetected.

“If you make a mistake, the audience doesn't even know what's going to happen,” he said. “They don't know you made a mistake.”

Matthew recalled one snafu in particular that went unnoticed by the crowd.

“The biggest accident from one of our shows was actually on live TV,” he said. “One of the illusion props that we performed with hundreds of times and rehearsed hundreds of times broke as we made our lovely assistant Stephanie Bensette appear. She was an absolute professional and made it look so smooth it looked part of the show.”

Matthew said a magician should always have an ace up the back pocket.

“Another good tip is to have a backup plan,” he said. “If you're working on something big you might get nervous about, have an out or a backup plan prepared that you can fall back on. Rubber bands wasn't the best one, but at least I didn't just walk off stage. I tried to do something that was improvised. But if you have more time to think it out, have something prepared if you can.”

Matthew’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/magicacematt/

Matthew’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@magicacematt