MASTER magician and recent winner of the Oscars of Magic, Steve Spade, revealed he hopes to perform a death-defying act in his native Limerick.
If given the green light, the extravagant plan will be the show-stopper to Spade’s national Lost Magic tour, which comes to Dolan’s Warehouse on September 5.
The Coonagh man, who has magic consulted on major movie productions, has amazed audiences by escaping from being chained up in a locked box that was placed into the River Shannon, and living to tell the tale after being chained to a chair inside a mobile home that was destroyed by a wrecking ball.
Spade’s current tour opens a magical vault to a century of illusions, mind reading, hypnosis, and escapology.
“I want to do a massive act in my home city as a thank you for all the support people here have given me over the years,” said Spade, who was honoured with the prestigious Merlin Award, or Oscars of Magic, at a ceremony in Las Vegas last year.
Fresh from appearing in front of Electric Picnic crowds, Spade, whose hero is the late great escape artist Harry Houdini, said he was “excited to let people see the new show because it has got such fanfare across the country”.
He told the Limerick Post that he hopes to take his audience on an emotional journey as he introduces more of his own personal life experiences to his work, including the recent death of his father and becoming a father himself.
“I talk a bit about my Dad, my whole story, loss, and that’s all built into the show – I’m very me on stage for the first time, it’s me being very raw and organic with the audience,” explained Spade.
“People want to come up to me after the shows and tell me their own personal life stories. We can all relate to loss, so there’s a kind of a hidden meaning behind the show.
“I think Dad would appreciate and enjoy the tribute piece that I have created and put into the show; I have connected it with the audience and I try and share that moment with them.”
Spade admitted his new show emotionally impacts on him as well as the audience.
“It just hits home very hard, especially on me, it’s hard to perform it, but I feel the audience have spent their money and they deserve to experience something they won’t experience again, so I feel it is worth sharing a bit of myself on stage.”
Spade’s father, Michael, passed away five years ago as the world was walking into lockdown and families were separated from one another during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Spade offered that the tour has helped him grieve his father’s passing.
”I think that part of the grieving of it, in a sense, putting my father into the show, was hard initially; it started out a smaller part but because of the natural synchronicity of the show I started extending (Dad’s) part more,” he said.
“People can relate to it because of loosing loved ones in the pandemic and all that kind of sense of loss and abandonment.
“There is a lot of that in the audience, you can feel it, and people come up to me afterwards and they want to tell me their story – that’s something I didn’t expect.”
There will be audacious trickery and lots of audience participation in store at his homecoming, Spade promised.
