The Purple Rabbit | Strut & Fret
Magic tricks as entertainment have rather unfairly copped the reputation as being the sole purview of nerds, but The Purple Rabbit is determined to present a fresh, inventive, and raunchy magic experience for the audience. Brought to you by Strut & Fret, the creators of Blanc de Blanc and Limbo, not surprisingly The Purple Rabbit is a rollicking fun time.
The five performers all brought wonderful energy and presence from the moment they came onto the stage, showcasing their wide variety of tricks and talents. Most surprising for me was the combination of a champagne bottle and vocal percussion from the beatboxing champion Gale, whose exquisite sonically complex acts made me wish I could have enjoyed his work on a dance floor.
The most impressive sleight of hand came from Dom Chambers, who doubled as MC. Billed as an “alcoholic Harry Potter”, this description belies the sophistication of his craft and showmanship, and his first act producing schooner after schooner of beer from impossible places was a fantastic opener for the show. Vincent Kuo’s awkward but cheeky persona lulled us into a false sense of complacency, but his Rubik’s Cube act had everyone’s jaw on the floor by the end. Regarding visual accessibility, it needs to be noted that while there was a live-feed video camera used for a couple of the more detail-oriented acts, there were a few more that would have benefited from being able to see the detail immediately, instead of squinting through the “Is this your card?” moment and having to rely on the reactions of closer audience members to know if it was, indeed, their card or not.
On the mentalist side of magic, Harper Jones, the delightful Sex Psychic-ologist, had her work cut out for her in making cold reading fun. One-on-one audience participation is a particularly tricky act to navigate, because its success relies entirely on whether or not the audience believes when the performer says, “You and I have never met, right?” I’m not sure I came away from it with my belief entirely suspended, as much as I wanted it to be, but her confident comedic timing and celebration of enthusiastic consent definitely made me want to see more of her work.
While technically impressive and performed with great competence, if you’ve been to Blanc de Blanc then Emma Karen’s foot juggling act will be one you’ve seen before. Given the context of a magic show, and that she was billed as the “Sleight of Foot” artist, this suggests that there will be something magical, some cunning trick that will deceive and then delight us. It feels incredibly wanky for me to express a desire for more, knowing the level of skill, strength, balance, and sheer bloody hours of practice that would go into perfecting such an act, and yet – for me – it under-delivered due to that misleading expectation, which does a disservice to what is a genuinely incredible feat of skill.
Of all the acts, this was the one that felt the most incongruous for me, which drew me to question whether Strut & Fret were unable to fully commit to a magician show without sneaking in a sexy circus act, as if they were worried it wouldn’t be engaging enough on its own. Perhaps this would have been less noticeable if there was more of a sense of aesthetic cohesion throughout the production as a whole, but having attended other shows by Strut & Fret, The Purple Rabbit feels the least refined, and the most ‘filler’ show on their entertainment roster.
Which brings me to the buzzkill thought I had after the show (why yes, I have been told that I must be fun at parties). If you’ve been to a magic show before, or seen any clips from Penn & Teller online, you’ll be familiar with the trope of under-promising and over-delivering, because it’s just so much more of an enjoyable surprise when the performer fails to do what they said they would, only to pull off something even more impossible and unexpected. Right up the top, before the performers came onto the stage, the scene was set by using the Red Pill/Blue Pill monologue from The Matrix. Given what we know of the creators and how that movie was an extremely pointed metaphor for the Transgender experience, it bugged me that the speech was set dressing only. For me, and other queer and/or gender-diverse audience members, that choice of specific media signals the potential for an experience to subvert gender and sexuality expectations. They could have just as easily used audio from Alice in Wonderland for the aesthetic effect, without setting up something that never eventuates and that was clearly never intended to be part of the experience. Sometimes, things can just be fun, and The Purple Rabbit certainly delivered a fun show, but for professionals who are deeply familiar with the art of managing audience expectations it was an annoying misstep.
However, for audiences new to circus and magic shows, The Purple Rabbit is sure to delight and entertain.
