‘Penn & Teller’ the talk of the town — literally

Friday, Oct. 4, 2002 | 11:07 a.m.

How can anyone complain about a "Penn & Teller" performance?

They are one of the best magician teams in the world.

No one can touch them when it comes to clever, creative, sometimes macabre illusions (a rabbit dropped into a wood chipper, for example).

They are perfectly suited for each other. Both are geniuses in their own way -- Teller, the small-sized intellectual who never speaks onstage; Penn Jillette, the giant with the persona of a hippie who never shuts up.

Shakespeare recognized that brevity is the soul of wit.

Why can't Penn?

His verbosity was one of the few distractions in a recent performance at The Rio's Samba Theatre that, on the whole, was thoroughly enjoyable -- full of the trademark "Penn & Teller" ingenuity and bravado.

The duo inked a new deal with The Rio last month to appear six nights per week at the Samba Theatre through December 2004. They reportedly will be paid several million dollars a year to entertain their multitude of fans.

Maybe Penn is being paid by the word.

The show opens with Penn, who is often hilarious, thanking the audience for coming to The Rio when they could have gone down the street to see magician Lance Burton, "If you wanted to see a greasy guy in a tuxedo."

Or they could have gone farther down the street to see "Siegfried & Roy" "torturing an endangered species."

Penn then launched into a dissertation about the opening bit -- the challenge box escape. His monologue sets up the payoff of the piece, but it was a long time coming. A three-minute spot was stretched to 10 minutes or more.

The illusion involves placing Teller inside a plexiglass box, and then placing the plexiglass box inside a wooden box, while Penn describes what is taking place.

Ultimately, the duo show how the trick is performed.

"Magicians are not supposed to tell how tricks are being done," Penn said. "But it's not a moral rule, it's an artistic rule."

Rather than placing the box behind a curtain while the magician performs his magic, Penn tells anyone in the audience who wants to be fooled, to keep their eyes closed.

"You're on the honor system," he said. "You will have to choose to fool yourselves."

As Penn, a competent musician, played the upright bass, Teller escaped from the plexiglass container and the locked wooden box when the sides of the wooden box slid up, allowing easy egress.

They revealed one more secret -- how a person is divided into three sections -- before moving on to a series of routines that often were funny and usually were amazing.

Especially impressive was a sleight-of-hand by Teller, in which he pulled coins from a fish bowl and gave them to a volunteer from the audience, then took some of the coins and put them back into the tank as they turned into goldfish.

And a card-counting trick was equally awesome.

The only bit that didn't work well was a knife-throwing skit. It went on too long and wasn't particularly funny or interesting. A volunteer was blindfolded and Penn pretended to throw knives at her. Then, again blindfolded, she was supposedly duped into believing she threw knives at Penn -- ultimately "stabbing" him.

Particularly amusing was a trick where Penn was placed in a straight jacket, stood on a chair and had a noose placed around his neck. A curtain was lowered to hide all of Penn but his lower legs.

The chair was removed and Penn was dangling in mid-air while supposedly attempting to escape from the jacket. All the while, Teller was using the curtain as a backdrop to create shadow animals with his hands.

Penn eventually appeared in the audience, still trapped in the straightjacket and shouting at the stage.

In a patriotic bit, Penn & Teller gave the illusion of burning an American flag, but it re-appeared on a flagpole, flying majestically as the two magicians stood at attention.

They ended the show with their classic magic bullet routine, in which each fires a bullet at the other through glass partitions and catch the bullets between their teeth.

A good ending. At least Penn wasn't able to talk for a while.