BRATTLEBORO — “Blending my passions has been a dream of mine for a long time,” says magician Jonas Cain, who will take the stage at the Hooker-Dunham Theater on Sunday, July 17, at 2 p.m., with his latest production, “It's a Magical Life!”
This 75-minute solo performance is much more than your run-of-the-mill magic show. Cain will combine all the things he does best: magic, comedy, poetry, and music.
“It's one part magic show, one part poetry reading, one part saxophone recital, one part stand-up comedy, and whole part entertaining,” Cain writes in his news release.
He says he was inspired to produce this show after years of practicing each discipline separately.
“I aim not just to amaze, but to also make you relax and laugh, and then scare you, maybe even make you cry, but most of all to get you to think,” Cain adds. “I'll be telling some pretty ridiculous jokes, but I'll also perform a version of a stunt that nearly killed me 18 years ago. So be prepared for some pretty wild surprises!”
He told The Commons, “I'm excited to see how my audiences respond.”
A magician reappears
Jonas Cain and his magic are no strangers to Southern Vermont.
“I have performed in Brattleboro twice already, although not in a long while,” he says. “My first time was 15 years ago, also at the Hooker-Dunham. For that show, I had been invited to join an act with a woman and another magician. Although there were only five people in the audience, I recall that I still had a lot a fun. I remember also thinking that the theater was beautiful.”
In 2008, he brought another show to Brattleboro, “It Just Happened the Other Day: A True Story,” this time performing at the New England Youth Theater.
“I had a larger audience for that one, which also was a lot of fun,” he says.
Cain is always eager to return here because he claims to get a good vibe whenever he comes to Brattleboro: “I consider it to be the Northampton of Vermont,” he says.
For more than 20 years, Cain has been performing magic in and around New England. But he's not just a regional artist.
Cain has traveled as far away as Las Vegas to study his craft at the McBride Magic and Mystery School. During that time he picked up the saxophone, having studied music formally at the University of Massachusetts and Westfield State College. He has since recorded several albums.
A Massachusetts native, Cain, 32, has been dabbling with magic tricks since he was a child.
“When I was 5 or 6 I first became fascinated by magic,” he explains. “That's not unusual, because quite often young kids, especially boys, want to be a magician at that age. However, most stop when they become teenagers and move on to other things. I never did.”
And Cain has made his magic pay.
'Magic with a message'
“Magic was my first part-time job,” he explains. “I performed at kids' birthday parties and church functions.”
Soon Cain was making magic his full-time profession, which he did for many years.
Recently, however, he took some time off from magic to go back to college, where he earned a liberal arts degree studying social ethics with a minor in religious studies.
What he learned in college has a strong impact on how he constructs his shows.
“Instead of magic ha-ha, I now want to do magic with a message,” he says. “I still aim to make my shows entertaining, but now they must be more than just that.”
Cain has rethought his use of magic, and now he has overarching themes for his magic shows.
Cain first merged storytelling and magic in his solo performance, “It Just Happened the Other Day: A True Story,” which he ultimately turned into a book with the same name published in 2010.
“That magic show was the first ... based on my life,” he says. “I used magic to illustrate each story I was telling, with all my crazy feelings.”
The show was precipitated by a crisis in Cain's life.
“My fiancee had suddenly passed away, and I became very depressed.” he explains. “I started thinking that anything good about life was just an illusion. That made me question what I did, since magic is all about illusion, and I became angry at my job.”
Soon, though, Cain began to realize that he could use magic in a different way.
“I saw that magic could be truly an art which I would use to express greater things,” he says.
Pins and needles
To demonstrate this idea, in “It Just Happened,” he performed a dramatic trick: Cain swallowed a handful of needles and some string. He then pulled out of his mouth the needles, all now threaded on the string.
“That is a classic trick which even Harry Houdini used in his act,” Cain says. “Magicians do other magician's tricks all the time, and it's considered not only appropriate but really a sort-of tribute. It's rather like bands doing covers of classic songs in their act.”
However, in his show the trick had a personal meaning for Cain.
“Before I performed the trick, I spoke about my experiences with the sudden death of my fiancee and how it made me feel. I told my audience that the day I heard that she had died, my entire body felt numb, like there were dozens of needles inside my skin.”
By combining narrative and performance, such a magic trick now had an emotional component.
“'It Just Happened' was very cathartic for me,” he says. “The performance at the NEYT was one of only four times I ever did it. Whatever it was I was trying to work out, the show did its job, and I felt I didn't have to do it anymore.”
Cain's newest show is even more complex. Besides being multidisciplinary, he also talks about the things he has done since “It Just Happened.”
“But I discuss more than just that,” he says. “I also tell how I got started with magic, and share some of my life lessons such as how to get a positive perspective when living gets you down.”
“It's a Magical Life!” was created at the beginning of summer to celebrate his graduation from college, and Cain has performed it only once since then, in a shortened version. So Brattleboro is only the third presentation of this adventurous work.
“Although it is not a work-in-progress, I never feel a performance is complete,” Cain says. “I see what I do as an evolving work of art, rather like a sculptor, always chiseling away at some beautiful stone, smoothing the edges here, highlighting a detail there, but all the while the stone had ideas of its own. You have to learn to go with the flow.”
Cain considers himself to be what he calls an “honest magician. Sometimes I will even tell my audience how the trick works as I do it. For instance, if I am doing a card trick, I show the audience a deck of cards and tell them you should make sure the cards are real - although what I don't add is that these are fake.”
But isn't that trickery too?
“As with any magician, sure, I lie,” he says. “But I'm actually honest when I lie, like a politician.”