Card Tricks and Smokestacks – A Review of Paul Gertner’s Steel City Miracles

By Timothy Ruppert

“Magic is one of the world’s most honest professions,” Paul Gertner claims early on in Steel City Miracles. “We tell you that we’re going to lie to you, and then we do.” In truth, Gertner is among the very finest sleight-of-hand entertainers in the world of legerdemain, as his terrific new Liberty Magic show decisively proves. What is more, beyond the myriad illusions that he renders, Gertner evinces wonderful storytelling skills, and his facility with personal reflections and recollections places every trick within the framework of an engaging autobiographical narrative. These elements combine seamlessly, investing in the public spectacle of Steel City Miracles with private history and shareable feeling. The result is an especially dynamic evening of memory and misdirection performed with humor, wit, and heart.

Not surprisingly, Gertner’s act involves the manipulation of an assortment of props—coins appear from the air, dice materialize under cups, words form and reform on the edge of packs of cards. Yet Gertner takes care to contextualize his impressive repertoire of mirages within tales of his youth and career, thus ensuring that every physical object bears some relationship to experience and. continuing ideas. Given that Gertner grew up in Pittsburgh, his life stories include numerous references to the city: we hear of the steel mills, Carnegie Library, and neighborhoods ranging from Millvale to Shaler to Fox Chapel. These allusions help create a portrait of the artist as a young man, enhancing his bond with the audience while intensifying the glamour and prestige of his professional coups (such as fooling Penn and Teller with a wickedly unshuffled pack of cards). Indeed, his warmth and humility help Gertner not only to sell the tricks but to charm the onlookers; he endears his audience with home movies and an old leather-covered notebook in which his late father logged details of every film he had seen from his youth to the point of his untimely death at the age of forty-seven. This blend of elements works remarkably well in fashioning a hometown persona for an internationally celebrated wizard whose career journey features stops in Los Angeles, Madrid, and Boston (Gertner’s recounting of the legendary Charles Dickens mirror at the Omni Parker House is particularly fascinating). After all, some of the very first tricks Gertner learned involved ball bearings that the machinists at the mill where his father worked had rejected.

Toward the close of the evening, Gertner reminds us that “I told you I was going to lie to you—and I kept my word.” But he mentions too an ineluctable truth, delivered with the crisp wisdom of the Stage Manager from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town: “Many different miracles [get] performed sometimes without [our] even knowing it.” The confluence of top-tier magic and (seemingly) casual historiography makes Steel City Miracles not simply a delightful but a necessary theatrical experience.

—TR

“Paul Gertner in Steel City Miracles” runs through Sunday, 31 May. For information and tickets, please visit https://trustarts.org/production/104119/paul-gertner-in-steel-city-miracles.