During The Mentalist, his highly entertaining show at Planet Hollywood, Gerry McCambridge explains that mentalism is the “art of screwing with your mind”. The show consists of a series of psychological parlor tricks designed to pull information from audience members…information McCambridge turns around and uses to get deeper into our psyches. (No worries here, shy folks; nothing truly embarrassing happens and all participation is voluntary!) For instance, before the show starts, audience members are directed to jot down information about a secret crush on a piece of paper and toss it into a box onstage. McCambridge proceeds to “interview” audience members, making surprisingly accurate guesses about what they’ve confessed…all before opening and reading what they’ve written.
In an elaborate game with a telephone book, he brings eight women onstage and hands them each a manila envelope. Using one of these women as his proxy to search for numbers in a phone book, and relying on random suggestions from audience members to direct her, he turns this interactive bit (which has a great reveal, by the way) into an object lesson in misdirection and human gullibility. We find this out because after he completes the phone book routine, McCambridge goes back through it and explains to us how he did it! In fact, the show’s real charm is in this illusionist’s willingness to dissect his own work and spill his secrets.
A student of human behavior, memory techniques, body language, and “psychometry” (the art of diving information about people from inanimate objects they’ve touched), McCambridge admits that his particular gift comes from years of cultivating observational skills at the heels of his police officer father. After launching a career as a teenage magician, McCambridge parlayed his sleight of hand skills and intuition into his later stint on the 2004 television special, “The Mentalist” …and then, Las Vegas.
What’s so refreshing about this show is its relaxed pace and gently snarky attitude. McCambridge is a funny guy, a guy you’d want to have over for a barbeque. But he’s also a born entertainer and he knows how to manipulate his audience into seeing what he wants them to see.
While this show is more about mind games than death defying acts, things actually do get scary (and potentially gruesome) when McCambridge invites a volunteer from the audience to use psychometry to find the spike that his assistant has hidden beneath one of four Styrofoam cups. He asks the volunteer to “feel” with her mind whether the cup under his hovering hand contains the spike. If she tells him “no”, then he SMACKS his hand down hard onto the cup, causing the room to erupt in horrified gasps. It’s an effective, nail-biting bit.
To reveal the outcome of this or any of McCambridge’s tricks would be to take away the fun of discovery. Suffice to say that if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself turning to your date throughout the night asking, “how’d he do that?!” And if you come to see McCambridge, he just might tell you.
-Cecelia Hart
