A night filled with tricks, illusion, magic and comedy are some of the things you can expect form Center Stage act Mike Super.
Mike Super will be performing at the Kirkham Auditorium on Friday May 18 at 6:30 p.m. and at 8:30 p.m.
Super said he began practicing magic when he was around 6 years old while he was in Walt Disney World.
“I was in Walt Disney World and there was a magic shop there,” Super said. “There were these silly little magic tricks, and I didn’t want to leave the magic shop and my parents had to bribe me to get me to leave. I was so obsessed with magic that I didn’t even want to ride the rides in Disney World.”
He said now, after becoming a professional magician, he performs at Disney World all the time so it’s a full circle.
Super said he receives his inspiration for new tricks is by his meet & greets after each of his shows.
“I do a meet & greet after every show,” Super said. “It’s because I really, truly enjoy meeting people, but the other reason is that the audience members at that meet & greet will say, ‘hey you should do this” or ‘hey you should try this” or they will say a joke ‘hey make my mother-in-law disappear’ and then we started making an audience member disappear.”
He said now his show is audience defined and loves when he is able to challenge himself with new ideas.
Super said his favorite current trick he performs is picking out the lottery numbers for the audience.
The show, super said, is mostly all audience participation so he has to be ready to change things every time.
“It’s almost like being an improve magician, in that I have to relate to personalities and they can do anything,” Super said. “When I do a trick I try to plan it so I have multiple ways that I can take the trick, so if something goes wrong I can switch gears and the audience has no idea.”
Super said the hardest part of what he does is being able to capture people’s attentions and being able to keep it.
“In today’s society with a cellphone in your hand, you have endless entertainment there that you are competing with,” Super said. “The biggest challenge then becomes adding actions and different emotions so that it hold their attention just like a good movie would.”
The best compliment, Super said he receives is when someone comes up to him and tells him they were dragged to the show by their friends and were surprised at how much they enjoyed it.
Super said he hopes the audience isn’t only amazed but he wants them to be able to feel different emotions throughout the show.
“I want them to laugh and cry and we try to hit all of those emotions into the show,” Super said. “That’s really the greatest challenge to take a magic trick to make somebody feel something.”