The illusion reaches a climax. There is an explosion and a cage flies open. But the cage is empty; then the audience sees magician Dirk Arthur run across the stage with a tiger at his side. Both are fine, and the two get a standing ovation. It is a highlight of his show and one of the few times a large cat is outside a cage in front of a live audience.
Dirk Arthur has been in this business for many years now, and he has never had an accident. He performed as the featured variety act in Jubilee! for years, and in Splash, as well as having his own full production show at the Silverton and Union Place. Currently he has his most high-profile gig yet at the Tropicana. According to Arthur there is a reason for his safety:
"We're really, really careful with how we present the cats. We have a lot of specially designed illusions which use bulletproof plastic so the audience can get a really good view of the cat and be safe, and we have a special kind of fine mesh, again, to keep the cats contained. But when we do walk the cats we are very, very careful and it gets a huge response."
From what I can tell with my untrained eye, the cat is on a leash held by Arthur, and a trainer follows behind when they walk across the stage. But that is about to change. Unknowingly, this audience would be the last to see the illusion performed this way.
Just after the audience files out, Arthur explains that he didn't start out as an animal handler. Like many magicians, Arthur was first inspired to bring large cats into his show by seeing Siegfried & Roy, and so he developed the methods he uses to handle animals essentially on his own:
"I got into magic before I got into the animals, and then I had rabbits, and the typical magician animals. But I always loved animals. And when Siegfried & Roy became popular I thought that looked like the best magic in the world. I got my first lions when I was 20 years old and I worked under different trainers and I did a lot of trial and error."
The result has been a show in which there have never been problems with the large cats who thrill audiences twice a day. But these days the government is much more concerned than in the past. Arthur explains:
"Ever since the accident with Roy (in 2003), the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) has been coming down on people exhibiting anything dangerous—particularly the big cats. So they have new guidelines that they want us to follow. So, what they have requested is that they want some sort of additional restraint whenever we walk the big cats."
This required a great deal of contemplation because the entire point of illusions involves a perfect balance of lighting, stagecraft and skill to make things look natural to an audience. So any additional restraint could ruin the entire illusion and that would have forced Arthur to remove one of the most popular elements of his show. "The cats are the hook that brings the people in the door." Surprisingly, Arthur found the government to be remarkably understanding.
"The USDA have been really great at working with us. They understand that we have been doing things a certain way for many years. And I've never had an accident—knock on wood—so they have been really cool about giving me time to work on it."
After much contemplation, Arthur came up with a solution based on the cable system used in old Tarzan movies.
"This is probably the first time this has been used in a live show, but it is actually a pretty commonplace training technique. We spent many, many months experimenting. What we came up with is a cabling system that uses a high- strength aircraft cable, and we're going to secure that to the cats when we're walking them on stage. We're kind of excited about this because we think it will allow us to have the identical presentation that we have always had—because a lot of the excitement is when the cats just leap out of nowhere and just scare the crap out of people. And it's not going to really affect the cat's training at all since they are going to be doing the same routine; the only difference is we'll have this thin black cable and they will hardly notice it since to them it is just another leash and they are already leash-trained. So ... the aircraft cable will meet with the new federal guidelines."
Arthur takes the black cable and stretches it as far as it can go across the stage to where I am sitting in the front row. We are probably both wondering if a tiger at the end of it could take a bite out of me. "We need to shorten it a tiny bit," Arthur yells back to his assistant. Then it's time for the test. I move back one seat.
Using the cable, Arthur performs an illusion first with a white Bengal tiger and then with a spotted leopard. Because the cable is black I can't see it from my seat in the audience (which is the point). Both tests are seamless. "We may start using it tomorrow," Arthur says. He is clearly delighted.
But he is also realistic that while someone with his reputation can keep working with large cats, the animals' future in other shows is less certain:
"I don't know. It's hard to say. I think it is a very great form of magic. People are always enthralled at how you can make a tiger disappear or appear compared to an inanimate object or compared to a dove or something. But the regulations are more strict and it's harder just to get a license to be able to have the cats. So, it is probably going to fade out over time."