Broadway star Sutton Foster (two-time Tony Award winner) sat in the front row at Chamber Magic earlier this year. We had a great chat afterwards – her pal and Younger co-star Hilary Duff recommended me as a “must-see.”
In a recent Huffington Post interview, Sutton was asked to name her favorite date night idea in New York City…
Read the full post »I’m always looking for incredible things to do in NYC—hidden gems and New York attractions that most people don’t know about (unless you hear it from “the natives”) that I can share with friends and guests at my shows.
I updated the list I posted in 2010 and have added more of the coolest, quirkiest things to do in New York that are guaranteed to not only keep you busy for years to come, but also leave you with stories to share for life.
Please enjoy and share these…
Read the full post »Chan Canasta (1920-1999) is one of my heroes in magic. In front of live audiences he took major risks that are breathtaking to behold. Sometimes a trick wouldn’t work and his entire presentation failed. Unlike a traditional magician, Chan Canasta was fine with that. Failure was an acceptable outcome. But when he succeeded, ah! The outcome was gloriously impossible. This was part of the public’s fascination toward Chan’s brand of psychological illusion – they were keenly aware that his experiments could fail, so they believed he was real. His approach elicited empathy, and audiences earnestly wanted him to succeed.
Later in life, he left the world of public performance and focused on another lifelong passion – painting. As artists evolve, they often find new outlets to express themselves. Chan put down the deck of cards and picked up a paintbrush to stimulate audiences in a fresh way. His paintings presented the world in a dreamlike fashion, challenging viewers to discern the difference between reality and illusion.
Today Chan Canasta paintings are seldom seen – most are held in private collections spread across the globe. I encountered my first Chan Canasta painting in 2004 hanging on the wall of Derren Brown’s flat in London. It made an impact on me because I knew that the canvas behind the plate glass had been personally touched by our mutual hero. Although Chan died in 1999 and I had never met him in person, I felt his presence while standing in the same room as his painting.
Years later, I chanced across an eBay auction containing twenty Chan Canasta paintings. At the time I wasn’t in the market to purchase art, but I felt a sudden inspiration to create screenshots of each painting. I saved those digital files and later posted them in a blog post on my website, dated April 13, 2010. The dealer selling these paintings was located in Brussels, Belgium, and I instructed my blog visitors to contact this dealer via eBay if they wished to purchase an original Canasta.
After a week of being listed on eBay, something magical yet disturbing happened. Not only did the auction listings end, but the Belgian art dealer himself had vanished. There was no way to track him down on eBay, since he had used an untraceable screen name that didn’t correspond to any known galleries.
I continued to host the twenty images on my blog. Five years passed.
On January 9, 2015, I received an email from a lady named Renata Kadrnka who explained that she was Chan Canasta’s widow. The day she wrote would have been Chan’s 95th birthday and she was reminiscing about life with her late husband. Renata had searched the Internet for articles about Chan, and stumbled across my blog post.
To my knowledge…
Read the full post »My latest project is finally complete! After a year of planning, I’m proud to announce the release of my new ultra-luxury deck of playing cards. Think Federer’s tennis racket, Baryshnikov’s dance slippers, Perlman’s violin. For a close-up magician like me, an essential tool of the trade is a good deck of cards—and none measured up. […]
Read the full post »
I’m often asked how someone becomes a magician. The snappy answer is: “I was tricked into it!” But in truth it takes a lot of hard work, starting at a young age.
My uncle Nat Zuckerman showed me my first card trick at age six, and I knew from that moment on that I had to become a magician. It felt preordained.
When I was 13 years old, my parents sent me to Tannen’s Magic Camp, a week-long sleepaway camp for young magicians. My fellow campers included David Blaine and Adrien Brody. Thirty years later (!) I was invited back to the same camp to teach and perform. Last Wednesday I volunteered to spend a full day with 130 enthusiastic teenage magicians.
I went there with the intention to inspire them — to show the campers where magic might take them. After all, I sat in their seats thirty years ago and have since turned my passion into a successful career. What I wasn’t expecting was how the students would inspire me with their energy, raw talent and deep enthusiasm for our shared love of magic.
Read the full post »You would expect a magician to utter such words as, “That was a magical year!” But in the case of 2013, I can safely say that it was a year full of non-stop magic.
Please enjoy reading my 2013 highlights, complete with photos. (Click photos for a larger view, and click the links for even more details of each event.)
• 15,000 guests visited me at Chamber Magic in the magnificent Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. I presented 5 shows every week, 250 shows in total. Chamber Magic is now in its 14th year, and I’m loving every minute.
• I performed in Moscow at a private party held in a Russian Foreign Ministry palace.
• I was a presenter at TEDx Broadway. We invited random audience members onto the stage to name their favorite drinks, and drink them from my magic teapot. My favorite reaction was from a Twitter response: “This magician at #TEDxBroadway just made a Mai Tai out of thin air. JESUS LIVES”
• My television special Lost Magic Decoded aired internationally in Israel, India, Canada, Brazil, Indonesia, and Italy. Together with talkshow legend Dick Cavett and director Robert Palumbo, I presented a screening & discussion in New York City at the prestigious 92nd Street Y.
• David Ben invited me to Toronto to present six performances of Chamber Magic at the prestigious Luminato Arts Festival. Previous performers at past Luminato festivals include Juan Tamariz, Mac King, and Max Maven. The Canadian national newspaper Globe and Mail raved: “You haven’t seen magic tricks until you’ve seen Steve Cohen.”
Read the full post »Review and interview by DrSue.com
Do you believe in magic? You might after seeing Steve Cohen’s Chamber Magic Show at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. His fame has grown since he started in 2001, but not the size of each audience, which he limits to fifty, to create an intimate, interactive experience. As befits the Waldorf, Steve performs in an elegant, custom-tailored suit – an homage to a bygone, more elegant era.
Most of us dress in cocktail attire, because we’re all part of the show – and what a show! There’s sleight-of-hand (including a card that seems to turn a somersault in the air before landing in the middle of a shuffled deck), mental telepathy (Cohen guessed one audience member was thinking about his pet chinchilla), and a delightful “Think a Drink” teapot that could pour any drink his audience imagined! Steve’s setting, sartorial choices, and select audiences (stars of stage and screen, royalty, and Fortune 500 companies) have dubbed him “The Millionaires’ Magician,” but Steve prefers to think of himself as “the thinking man’s magician.” After his performance, we had a chance to chat, and I asked him why…
Read the full post »Departures Magazine
May/June 2013, p. 160
by Jim Windolf
Anyone with a handheld device is a magician of sorts. So how to explain the resurgence of old-fashioned magic in popular culture? Why are people falling for a brand of entertainment that seemed at its height a hundred years ago, when Harry Houdini was all the rage? Haven’t we moved beyond that?
Apparently not. In a private suite at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, Steve Cohen, known as the “Millionaires’ Magician,” presents a stately 90-minute illusionfest, Chamber Magic, five times a week. Last year he became the first magician in nearly four decades to appear at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, and his refined act has impressed guests at the homes of Barry Diller, Martha Stewart and Warren Buffett, among others. And maybe that’s the role of magic these days – to provide a dash of wonderment for those who have seen it all.
Read the full post »Toronto’s Luminato Festival is a big deal. Each summer, hundreds of performing artists are invited to Toronto to participate in a 10-day celebration of the arts. Since the festival’s inception seven years ago, “magic” has been included in the programming thanks to the efforts of David Ben and Julie Eng. International stars of magic such as Juan Tamariz, Max Maven and Mac King have performed their full shows there in previous years.
This year I was asked to present “Chamber Magic” at Luminato, and I’m glad I accepted the invitation. On June 17, 18 and 19, I performed six shows (two each night) at the George Brown house, a National Historic Site that usually is off-limits to the public. The house was completed in 1876 and restored to its former glory – an excellent location for my old-school brand of parlor magic. In fact, the show was situated right in George Brown’s parlor — you can’t beat that! […]
Read the full post »THE GLOBE AND MAIL
June 18, 2013 by Michael Posner
Monday evening: George Brown House, an Ontario heritage building situated just south of the University of Toronto, is named, of course, after the distinguished Father of Confederation and founder of The Globe, the newspaper that became the newspaper you are reading. Normally off-limits to the great unwashed, Brown’s stately home was the venue chosen by Luminato’s go-to magic man, David Ben, to showcase the extraordinary legerdemain of American magician Steve Cohen.
The setting proved an apt backdrop for Cohen’s act, which owes a considerable debt to Johann Hofzinser, the 19th-century Austrian known as the father of card magic. At New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Cohen’s unofficial home, he typically entertains audiences of no more than 50. For the Toronto cohort, only slightly larger, the diminutive Cohen – nattily attired in morning coat, waistcoat and striped trousers – deftly stick-handled his way through a series of jaw-dropping tricks, each seemingly more difficult than the last. […]
Read the full post »