The Magic Show: Original Broadway Cast CD January Records, 1998 The Magic Show: DVD Image Entertainment, 2001     Reviewed by Tony Buchsbaum	My love of Broadway started with the scarves. Day-Glo colored scarves that danced in two pairs of hands, then all around the stage, then into one of those large jugs used in office water dispensers. They even danced when the magician put a cap on the jug. To say I was amazed would be quite an understatement. But whether it was the scarves or the fact that this was my first Broadway show is a toss-up. The year was 1976, and The Magic Show was the musical to see. In the constantly moving river that is the zeitgeist, it was that moment's Les Misérables, that time's The Phantom of the Opera. It sported a dozen songs by the great Stephen Schwartz, who'd recently stunned Broadway with Godspell and whose Pippin was still a year away, and it starred Doug Henning as the wild-haired, mustachioed, bucktoothed, rainbow-wearing magician. It even featured the legendary Anita Morris as a make-believe woman who's conjured up whenever some guy in a top hat and cape needs a magician's assistant -- or a sexy paramour. It was a terrific amalgam: Broadway show and magic spectacle, all set in a seedy club in New York City as Doug and an aging illusionist, played by David Ogden Stiers, wait for the appearance of a big-time producer to come and see their acts. It was sheer magic, in every way that mattered to a 14-year-old boy. After I saw it and returned home to New Orleans, I had to hear it again. I ran out and bought the cast recording at Smith's Records on St. Charles Avenue. I remember it had a cool trick inside, a folding cardboard wonder designed by Henning himself. Eventually, LPs disappeared, and I waited and waited for The Magic Show to appear on CD. I even had occasion to ask Stephen Schwartz about it, and he told me the original tapes had been lost or destroyed -- and that a CD would likely never happen. And then, naturally, it did. A small company called January Records (no relation to the venerable online magazine) issued a CD of The Magic Show cast recording -- the same one I had more or less grown up listening to. It was all there: "Up to His Old Tricks," the opening number with the dancing scarves; a faux rock epic called "Solid Silver Platform Shoes"; "Lion Tamer," which Doug's assistant Cal sings plaintively about her longing for love; "Style," the older magician's song-long, zeitgeist-tripping dig at Doug's colorful wardrobe; Anita Morris' country-twanged "Charmin's Lament," in which she whines with utter charm about being conjured "out of thin air for immoral purposes"; "The Goldfarb Variations," in which the cast anticipates the big producer's visit; "West End Avenue," Cal's au revoir to Doug after he rebuffs her for Charmin; "Sweet Sweet Sweet," a hard-edged, synthesizer-heavy revenge song; "Before Your Very Eyes," the denouement song that brings Doug and Cal back together and the "Finale," a reprise of the opening number. I could not have been more happy. And then, naturally, I got even happier. A small company called Image Entertainment announced that it was going to issue a DVD of The Magic Show. What? First, the show's creator doubts the audio tracks exist at all, and now there's even video? What gives? Well, what gives is not what I expected -- and it's my disappointment that has inspired me to share all this with you. Instead of the mid-1970s brilliance I had seen on the stage of the Cort Theater, this was a filmed version of the show staged in Canada in 1981. It featured Doug Henning and Anita Morris -- but when I watched it, I discovered, to my horror, that this was not my beloved Magic Show. I'd wanted so much to see -- for the first time in 25 years -- those scarves. Anita slinking around the stage, then, for most of the show, actually cut in half, with each half on opposite sides of the stage. I wanted the oh-so-70s glitter of it all. But nothing about this version was the same. The scarves are there, but done in a much smaller way -- for video, not for the stage. "Platform Shoes" was gone. "Style" was a transformed into a similar but senseless send-up performed by a two-bit actor called Jon Finlayson, who had no idea how to play the song for its built-in nasty laughs. "Charmin's Lament" was even worse. Now it was an entirely new song, one that had precisely none of the charm and cleverness of the original. "West End Avenue" was jettisoned in favor of the forgettable "Where Did the Magic Go," a trite love song that mixes its lyrical metaphors, equating sleight-of-hand magic with the kind of magic that makes hearts sizzle with love. Even the dark, pushy "Sweet Sweet Sweet" was gone. In short, all the magic had been stripped out of The Magic Show. Stephen Schwartz is still listed as the composer, but somewhere along the way, he seems to have lost his own show. What was an engaging, well-written collection of songs was now a smaller collection of smaller songs -- smaller minded, smaller sounding, smaller in every way. To make matters even worse, if that's possible, the direction was hackneyed and the actors have zero charm -- not even the brilliant Anita Morris, who tried without much success to be both southern and sexy. Henning's work -- the magic itself -- was still astounding and his rapport with the audience was as effective as it was intimate. He didn't work within the lights-and-smoke spectacle of, say, David Copperfield, but he never tried to. That was a different shtick. Copperfield is a magician for the people, whereas Henning was a magician of the people. Worst of all, the whole DVD knows it's a sham: The cover art is the same as the art used for the cast recording, indicating that this is the production to be presented on the disc. Only when one opens the DVD does one see this production's actual art, a different image featuring Doug Henning and a couple of white unicorns -- particularly intriguing since there are no unicorns in either version of the show. If you're a fan of terrific musical theater, and if you missed the quirky, wonderful Magic Show back in the 70s, then I urge you to go out and pick up the cast recording on CD. By all means, however, avoid the DVD. It's not the Magic Show I saw, and it's not the Magic Show you would ever want to see. You'd be better off listening to the CD -- and conjuring the images on your own. One final note: While we're on the subject, Image Entertainment has also released a video recording of Stephen Sondheim's landmark show Follies on DVD. While the DVD's cover art is that used for the original Broadway production, the actual presentation is a concert version performed in the mid-1980s at Lincoln Center, starring Carol Burnett, Barbara Cook, Mandy Patinkin, Lee Remick and others. The DVD is wonderful, complete with rehearsal footage and the back of the DVD comes clean about what it really is -- but it isn't what's advertised on the front cover. A disturbing trend, to my way of thinking. | October 2001 Tony Buchsbaum is the author of Total Eclipse. At night he works on another novel and a screenplay. Days, he writes advertising copy in Lawrenceville, NJ, where he lives with his wife and sons.	It was a terrific amalgam: Broadway show and magic spectacle, all set in a seedy club in New York City as Doug and an aging illusionist, played by David Ogden Stiers, wait for the appearance of a big-time producer to come and see their acts. It was sheer magic, in every way that mattered to a 14-year-old boy.