(Photo by David Szymanski)
Michael Carbonaro, best known for the hit show “The Carbonaro Effect,” a hidden camera magic series that ran for five seasons on truTV, is heading back to The Plaza Live in Orlando May 18 with his “Lies on Stage” tour which he first performed in Orlando in October 2022.
Carbonaro has been seen in movies, such as the cult classic “Another Gay Movie,” and on television in shows such as “Happily Divorced,” “30 Rock,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “CSI Miami.”
Carbonaro spoke with Watermark over the phone ahead of his May 18 show at The Plaza Live.
You did 5 seasons of Carbonaro Effect, final season aired just before the world shutdown because of COVID. Any plans to return to the show, or to TV in general, maybe with something new?
I ended “Carbonaro Effect” by choice, it wasn’t pandemic related. It was just time after five seasons, 125 episodes; I did all I wanted to do and more and wanted to be live touring and looking to other things. But you know, we poke every now and then. I’ve actually been talking with the same team before on another project, and we have a few TV magic situations that we’re juggling around and hoping one will get some traction and stick. I’ve got some really great ideas for next level TV magic, and I hope to be able to present them.
Who are or were the magicians you looked up to?
I grew up as a Copperfield kid. I love David Copperfield. I think he enforced and taught me how to be an entertainer, how to just play with an audience. How to have fun and be serious in some moments, have some really shocking moments, have some totally goofy playful, silly moments and how to just improvise and engage with people. I totally learned all of that from mimicking Copperfield throughout my junior high school and high school years. I could show you some VHS, you’d be laughing.
Nowadays, even still, Penn and Teller. They were big for me as a kid, and even now they’re just amazing with how much fresh, new and innovative stuff they just constantly churn out.
I’m at a place now where these heroes of mine growing up as a kid are now colleagues. I just was in Vegas this past weekend and hanging out with Penn and Teller and talking about some TV projects we’re working on and some effects in the show and it’s amazing. If you had told me that 10 years ago, I would be like no way.
Derek DelGaudio is another one, probably not as mainstream known, but just a super innovative and artistic magical thinker and show creator.
Let’s talk about “Lies on Stage,” your tour that is coming to Orlando. You have been on tour for a minute now. Are you playing catch with shows due to COVID?
It’s funny how tours come together now. It’s not the same as it used to be where you’d be like here’s my tour and you just list all of the dates you’re gonna play, and then that’s your tour. They kind of come in slowly. There’s a lot of stops and starts, and still there’s so many markets we haven’t been to, so many places the show hasn’t gotten to play and then we get invited back to places which is awesome.
What can audiences expect to see when they come to your show?
I think anytime they get to come to see the show, a lot of people obviously know me from the TV show, they come to see if I can actually pull this stuff off live. There’s always the secret thought like maybe there’s camera tricks, maybe it is actors, so there’s this kind of thrilling excitement when they get to see stuff happen right before them.
I love getting to create an experience with people where it’s really, the magic is a huge part of it obviously, but it’s almost like the fact that I’m a magician is the biggest trick. It’s really just about gathering people together and having these fun, engaging, exciting, improvised playful and wild experiences. It’s really creating that vibe with the audience that I love so much, they love so much, and so it’s not just coming in, sitting and watching a movie. It’s really being engaged with your family, with your friends and there’s this back-and-forth flow of energy that happens in the show that I think is awesome.
Magic is amazing in this way that you can still “prank” people, like even though they know it’s coming you can still fool them. You still get to pull the rug out from under them and set up these situations in the show where they think it’s going one way and it’s going another way. There’s a segment of the show where I teach everybody in the audience how to execute a prank on their friends. There’s another section in the show, which is just killer, where two people from the audience are made to disappear. I bring two people up each night on stage and actually make them disappear.
You have several interactions with the audience in your show. Have you had any interactions go wrong, either with the trick or with a drunken audience member?
No, I actually haven’t. I have a good sense of, there’s this immediate casting process that happens when I come out into the audience and I think I’ve just developed a knack for really finding the right energy.
I mean, the closest thing to that is sometimes there’s one particular trick in the show where we’re going to do a teleportation act and I love to bring up a kid who kind of falls somewhere in the 7-year-old to 10-year-old range, and oftentimes I’ll walk out and pick someone I see. They’ve got the energy, they’re smiling. I can see the way they’re raising their hand, they’re gonna be great. And then I’ll call on them and they stand up and they’re like, three times the size of what I thought they were, like I’m watching them go through puberty. They stand up and they’re like seven feet tall and I’m like whoa, “How old are you?” and they’re like [in a deep voice] “fourteen.” That’s kind of fun because it brings a different vibe to the trick.
It is interesting how different tricks have different people that I like to pull up. There’s almost like they just fit this kind of energy that the trick is going to flow better with that.
Do you get nervous before a show?
I do. You know, it’s a bizarre thing with nervousness because it seems to arrive out of nowhere at some gigs and other gigs I’m like, “Oh, I’m really calm and ready to do this,” then other ones, “Oh my gosh, I’m like totally nervous today.” No idea why, but I find that to be a healthy thing because it means that I care.
You have a couple bits that you are really well known for, one of them being the shaving cream trick. Do you get fans come to your show and while you’re performing new tricks just yell out to do your classic bits?
It’s so funny you say that yes, totally. I mean, I’ve had gigs where people just bring up a can of shaving cream and put it on the stage. That was in my first tour show as the closer, and I returned to that sometimes like in Las Vegas when I did a run there, I put that back in.
A lot of people who come and they love the show but they’re like I wish you also did the shaving cream again, so we’ve actually been talking about, in the next tour, bringing that one back. I get a lot of people who love that and I also love performing that.
Michael Carbonaro’s “Lies on Stage” plays at The Plaza Live in Orlando May 18. Tickets are available at ThePlazaLive.org.
