A local magician is pulling a Christmas show out of his hat this season for all ages to enjoy.
The holiday event titled Dear Santa, I Can Explain - A Holiday Magic Show! is set for Dec. 28 at The Loft Art Space, at 125 Anne Street South in Barrie.
“Everyone seems to love magic,” Phil DaCosta, an award-winning master of the sleight-of-hand, told BarrieToday.
DaCosta said he performs a number of private events during the year, mainly birthday parties and corporate events, but there tends to be a lull between Christmas and New Year’s, so this year he decided to put on a special Christmas magic show.
“I am Santa’s resident magician, and I have a show to perform and I need to borrow Rudolph to get to the show on time, but the only problem is I’ve misplaced Rudolph,” DaCosta said.
“The show is interactive and has unique twists, and has the audience participate in the search for Rudolph,” he added.
A magician for just over 20 years, DaCosta also created a school of magic in 2018 in Mississauga where he previously resided before relocating to Barrie. There have been students enrolled from all over Canada.
In the last two years he won the Barrie Community Votes award for best magician.
It seems the magician market is fairly strong in the current economy.
“Believe it or not, there is quite a handful,” DaCosta said.
“Whenever I move to a new city I do some research in town on who the local go-to person is, and when we moved up here to Barrie I did find three at the time, but now there is definitely at least two more, within a half hour of Barrie,” he added.
DaCosta has always been passionate about the art of magic.
“When I was a small child, when I was six or seven, my grandfather used to show me some simple card tricks, and he had this one specific sleight-of-hand card trick that I could never do because my hands were way too small,” he said.
That fascination with magic never left him.
“About 20 years ago, when I was in teacher’s college, my friend was shuffling a deck of cards and I asked him if he knew any tricks,” DaCosta said. “He showed me one, and it blew me away.”
DaCosta asked him how he learned the trick, under the assumption that magicians were a small underground circle where, if you are not in that circle or know someone in that circle, you can’t be a magician.
“So he told me about a website that sells DVD videos, books, props, and I went onto the site and ordered a whole bunch,” he said. “And fast-forward about 15 years later, I now have a trick for sale on that website.”
According to DaCosta, the secret of a magic trick is “literally just five percent of the entire thing. The other 95 percent is practice, presentation and how you go about doing the trick.”
After learning the effect and the method behind it, he said it’s “kind of underwhelming,” but the presentation is what people will remember.
“I’ve had people come up to me years after I have seen them, and they bring a card out of their wallet and say ‘look, I still have this card that you signed from the show at the Toronto Zoo, or whatever.’ That’s always really awesome," DaCosta said.
“Just seeing the faces light up when you do something strange and have people gasp, is what fuels the passion for me," he added.
Dear Santa, I Can Explain - A Holiday Magic Show! runs on Dec. 28 with both a 2 p.m. and a 7 p.m. performance.
Tickets for the 90-minute all-ages show are $15, and more information can be found at www.dacostamagic.com
