Show just the beginning of magic

Marco the Magi, Le Grand David and their performing troupe have made birds and children disappear. They have levitated a miniature car and lowered it to be driven off stage. They have floated tables. Escaped from handcuffs and host of other restraints.

But their most difficult trick — something no one has ever done, not Houdini, not David Copperfield — is keeping their magic show running for 30 straight years at the Cabot Street Cinema.

It is the longest continuously operating stage magic show in history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

The secret to the trick and the show’s real magic has little to do with balancing a human parallel to the stage floor on a broomstick and more to do with the arcing connection the show builds, illusion by illusion, between the players and the audience.

For show founder and architect, 75-year-old Cesareo Pelaez — a.k.a. Marco the Magi — the show attempts, ultimately, to define love.

The words are more than warm, fuzzy and squishy platitudes. They are rooted in Pelaez’ psychological principles and theory. And they are rooted in the life Pelaez has lived.

Far more than a string of tricks and illusions, Pelaez, a retired professor of psychology at Salem State College and a student of Abraham Maslow, the founder of positive psychology, has structured the show around a series of archetypes. The show begins with birds, a symbol of peace. The magician pulls the birds out of the air and places each carefully in its own cage. Other illusions incorporate additional archetypes that reinforce Pelaez’ underlying message.

“You have to ask why people leave the show so happy,” said Pelaez.

“A couple in their 20s came up to me after a recent show in the lobby, because we come out and greet the audience after the show,” said David Bull, Le Grand David. “They looked like they were right out of Greenwich Village, all dressed in black. They looked like real hip artists. They came up to me and said, ‘Thank you for reminding us that there is real beauty in the world.’”

For a couple of hours at least, in the grandeur of the 1920 theater, that the 26-member troupe has carefully restored over the years, repainting wall and ceiling stencils, reguilding Corinthian columns on either side of the stage and rebuilding the stage guts to raise and lower a dozen handmade curtains during the show, the show creates a separate world of illusion that allows the audience to see the real truth.

“In the real world everything is open to parody, satire and mockery,” said Bull, himself a psychologist turned magician who has been with the show since its inception. “There is still a hunger in people to experience something that is beautiful.”

Building that experience has been a life-long and long-delayed dream for Pelaez, whose story in itself forms a real-life metaphor for the illusion and escape tricks that comprise the Le Grand show.

Pelaez remembers sitting on his father’s lap at stage magic shows in Santa Clara, Cuba. He began his own show as a teenager, first playing in his neighborhood with his friends, then playing charity shows for the local hospital and finally playing in Santa Clara’s biggest theater. The Castro revolution ended that and ended Pelaez’ life in his homeland.

Pelaez was a member of the underground fighting the Castro takeover. When the U.S. attempt to stop Castro ended in disaster at the Bay of Pigs, Pelaez was driven deeper into hiding. “I had to sleep in a different home every night to avoid capture,” Pelaez said.

Eventually the Cuban underground slipped him into the Columbian embassy dressed as a priest. “I remember blessing the soldiers as I went into the embassy.” From the embassy, Pelaez engineered another escape to Columbia, where he taught psychology at a Jesuit university there, until another revolution again threatened him.

At 26, Pelaez next fled to the United States, specifically to Brandeis University in Waltham where he studied and taught with Maslow until he recertified himself as a psychologist to U.S. standards.

Even as Pelaez rebuilt his career and his life, he never abandoned his dream of having his own magic company and theater.

He took a teaching position at Salem State College and stayed, year after year, because, “I was so touched by the students who were the first ones to go to college in their families, and then I had tenure.”

A heart attack at 40 forced his retirement at Salem State, but then a theater he’d been driving past on his commute each day was up for sale and he bought it in 1976. Pelaez then bought the Larcom Theatre in 1984, rescuing it from its use as a pornographic movie house. The troupe painstakingly restored both theaters, doing everything from reupholstering the seats to repainting stencils and cleaning and restoring paintings on the walls and ceilings. They cleaned and repainted the angels pressed into the radiators.

“At one time there were 10 theaters in Beverly,” said Pelaez. Now there are the Larcom, built in 1912 and the Cabot, built in 1920. Pelaez owns and helped restore both.

“When we started here,” said Bull, pointing around to the Larcom interior, “the roof leaked. Many of the tin ceiling tiles had rotted. We tracked down the original company that made them and we were able to have the replacement tiles done in the original pattern.”

Today, the Larcom serves primarily as a place to store props, rehearse and give shows for school groups. Private storage areas hold a trove of promotional posters, costumes and discontinued props, brightly painted boxes, tables and shelves all on castors in reds, yellows and greens that hold the secrets of illusion. They tell the history of the Le Grand shows, Pelaez’ legacy to Beverly and even the world. No hyperbole intended. The upstairs office walls are filled with citations and awards from organizations around the world. Celebrity fan photos, including Prince Charles, fill one wall completely.

But the photo Pelaez lifts his cane and points to is a framed, color 8-by-10 of a group of children. “They are from the school in my neighborhood. They had a reading contest to see how many books that they could read about magic. The prize was a show we did for them here. They were the first group of children that could come into the theater for many years.”

Quite a trick: Turning a porno house into a theater that could delight and inspire children.

The teacher and vision behind the two theaters and the Le Grand troupe walks using a black cane with a silver handle. White hair tops his head, replacing the jet hair of his youth. He walks slightly stooped. Sometimes his voice shakes a little. He’s still recovering from a stroke in 2006, though he’s returned to performing each Sunday at the Cabot Street Theatre show. And he can still spot a burned out light bulb in the top right corner of the Larcom stage. Or see the stage curtain is off kilter by an inch or two on the left hand side.

After spinning stories for over an hour straight, he’ll apologize, “My brain is tired now.”

A sense of legacy may come naturally to a 75-year-old man who’s suffered a stroke, but it’s also part of Pelaez’ own history and what nurtured him in his career.

Pelaez comes from a world in which tricks and illusions were passed down as an oral tradition, almost the way folk songs would pass from singer to singer or jokes passed from comedian to comedian. When Pelaez started there were few books on magic and certainly no DVDs. He learned his art show by show, performance by performance.

“Cesareo would give me indirect suggestions,” said Bull. “‘Here’s a trick, why don’t you go and see what you can find out about it.’ I’d begin working with it. Researching it. And I’d discover things that aren’t written in the books or instructions. Then I would show him what I’d learned and that’s when the real lesson would begin in terms of placing the illusion in a larger theatrical context.”

On a short ride from the Cabot to the Larcom, Pelaez remembers, “When I first bought the Cabot, there was only one restaurant on Cabot Street. Many of the windows were broken or boarded up. It’s good to see how the city has grown.”

“The Spanish word for exile translates to uprooted,” said Pelaez. “That’s what I was. Uprooted. And I needed to be rerooted in something that could help you grow. Beverly has been that for me.”