When I was a little boy, few things made me happier than going to the theater with my father. While other dads took their sons to Yankee stadium for a double header and a few hot dogs, mine took me to various Broadway theaters for matinees of Cabaret, Hello, Dolly!, or Hair, followed by an early dinner of roast beef hash at Sardi’s. To be fair, we did take the subway up to the Bronx a few times to watch a ball game but it was those afternoons in the dark at the Shubert or the Morosco or the St. James that bound us together and made me feel like the luckiest kid in town.
A little over three years ago, when my wife gave birth to our daughter, Helen, I immediately began champing at the bit for our first trip to the theater. By the time she turned two, I could wait no longer. I didn’t want her introduction to the stage to be something juvenile like The Gazillion Bubbles Show (though I have since promised to take her) but I also knew that she was probably not quite ready for Sweeney Todd. Then a friend told me about Mario the Maker Magician, who was then performing at the Soho Playhouse, describing him as the best children’s magician he’d ever seen–which, given that David Blaine has said the same thing, wasn’t damning him with faint praise. As a once and future magic nerd, who had spent his teenage years performing the Chinese Linking Rings and other tricks at kids’ birthday parties, I had a strong sense that I’d found the perfect show for our first dad-daughter theater outing. I wasn’t wrong.
Now, a year after that sold-out run, Mario is back at the Soho Playhouse, with a hilarious, high-octane show that blends astonishment, anarchy, and several jerry-rigged robots with an inspiring message about the importance of being who you are, doing what you love, and making magic out of the ordinary. It is a testament to Mario’s charm, charisma, and gleeful insanity as a performer–not to mention his singular gift for meeting kids exactly where they are–that, though his magic tricks (which are superb) flew over my daughter’s head when she was two, she went nuts along with the other kids in the audience and, clutching a souvenir plastic robot arm, careened out of the theater mad with joy. Since then, she has continued to ask, “Where Mario Maker ’gician go?” and “When we go ’nother show?” When I recently told her that I was taking her to see Mario again this coming weekend, she squealed.
Mario may be a maker ’gician but his real name is Mario Marchese. In his early 40s, Marchese is compact and wiry, with a boyishly handsome, elastic-featured face and a thick shock of dark, well-groomed hair perpetually on the verge of going rogue. Onstage, wearing a white shirt, skinny tie, and ripped black jeans, he is hyper-enthusiastic, hyper-excitable, and hyper-expressive. Offstage, he’s much the same, including the outfit, only a few degrees less hyper. I went to visit him the other day in Nyack, an hour or so outside the city, where he lives with his wife, Katie, who is also his producer, publicist, tour manager, and unofficial life coach, and their 13-year-old daughter, Gigi, and 11-year-old son, Bear. The kids have spent much of their childhood on the road, getting home-schooled and helping help out at shows. Though the image of the family criss-crossing the country in a 1971 light blue VW bus has an idyllic neo-Partridge Family vibe, those days may be coming to an end. “When they were toddlers, we could just throw them in car seats and drive to Colorado,” Marchese told me. “But now they’re getting older, and they just want to hang out with their friends–and I just want them to be happy.”
On the day before Marchese and Co. were set to load the show into the Soho Playhouse, the dining room where he and I chatted was filled with homemade-looking set pieces and gizmos–large, colorfully painted cardboard flats stacked against the walls, a primitive-looking robotic monkey in a threadbare top hat and a motorized Campbell’s soup can on an old trunk. They had presumably found storage space for the pile of 13,500 foam clown noses waiting on their front porch when they got home from California earlier this year. If Marchese’s show has a salvaged, Maker Faire vibe, that’s less a concession to budget limitations than an artistic choice, and also a kind of invitation to young audiences.“One of the greatest compliments we ever got,” Marchese said, “was after a show in Chicago, when a kid said to his mom at the merch table, ‘Mom, when I go home, I’m gonna go through the garbage can and build a magic show like Mario.’”
The son of Italian immigrants who spoke minimal English, Marchese grew up not far from where he lives now, though in an atmosphere of considerably less whimsy. His father, a stone mason, valued honest labor over self expression, and Marchese longed for something more. “I loved the creative side of things—I was always making stuff,” he recalled. “And I wanted to do something fun when I grew up.” After high school, Marchese spent a year at Nyack College before dropping out and hitting the road, hitchhiking across the country for two years with his dog and a guitar. He followed a girl he was dating to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where, one afternoon, he walked through the door of what he thought was an antiques store, only to find himself in a magic shop. “It was filled with crap from the floor all the way to the ceiling—all sorts of magic props. I bought a couple tricks, and then next thing you know, the bug bit.” For the next six months, Marchese spent nearly every day at the store watching the owner demonstrate tricks and picking up moves from the magicians who hung out there. He finally joined the local magic club and learned a few classic routines, which led to his first paying gig at a Chinese restaurant. “I got my first dollar at that restaurant,” he told me. “And, to this day, I have that bill framed right by my bedside.”
Marchese and his girlfriend broke up, and he wound up, at 23, back at home, tail between his legs, studying to be an elementary school teacher, while taking occasional gigs performing magic at children’s birthday parties. “The last thing I wanted to do was perform for kids,” he recalled. “I wanted to be like David Blaine. Everything sucked.” Then, Marchese started dating his future wife, Katie Rosa Marchese, though he was too embarrassed to tell her that he was a magician, much less a children’s magician, for three months, and then only because he needed a ride to a gig at a birthday party. After the show, she told him, “You don’t understand—you’re a rock star when you do this. Can’t you see that?” With Katie’s encouragement and business acumen, Marchese went on to become one of the most sought-after children’s magicians in New York, working his way from birthday parties to school assemblies and small theaters.
Marchese’s turning point as an artist came, as is so often the case, at a low moment. With more than a decade of performing magic for kids in the rear view mirror, he was feeling stuck on auto pilot. One night, after a show in Scarsdale, he overheard a father say to his wife, “That was Mario? That stupid show was what we spent all this money on?” He went home in tears, ready to throw in the towel. Once again, his wife came to the rescue, reminding him that he had an entire creative side of himself that he was leaving untapped: His ability to make stuff. She was talking specifically about the kind of homemade-looking robotic stuff that had become his obsession since stumbling into the high-tech-meets-DIY subculture of the Maker movement in 2005. Starting with building puppets, he had moved into programming motorized contraptions with an Arduino board and making his own parts with a 3-D printer.
Marchese went into his workshop and emerged three weeks later with a routine involving 17 motors and a series of banners made from pizza boxes that unfurl and fall to the floor in increasingly hilarious ways as Marchese tries in vain to keep them under control. With that, Mario the Magician became Mario the Maker Magician, and his career took off–he appeared on Sesame Street, went on tour with David Blaine as his opening act, and established himself as an artist who could not just keep kids entertained for an hour but create theater that spoke to and resonated with who they are.
And that, more than the magic and the robots and the jokes (or even his stories about how Warhol, Basquiat, and Calder inspired him), is what makes Marchese’s show so special. While remaining in complete control, he brings the proceedings past the point of silliness to the brink of chaos and lets the audience know that going to that place is okay. It’s more than okay, in fact–it’s the wellspring of imagination and, channeled into creative expression, a super power. It’s something that little kids, especially toddlers, already instinctively know. My daughter certainly seems to know it and demonstrates it every day when she sits in front of the refrigerator drinking milk out of the carton, calling it “My yummy guacamole,” or rips off her clothes and dances around the living room shaking a pair of maracas while improvising a song about a silly skeleton riding around on a chicken (huh?). I don’t want her to lose that (though I would like her to stop drinking milk that way). And I’m happy that the first thing she’s learning from the theater is, as Marchese put it the other day, “a little bit of the right kind of madness can change the world.”
