“Nothing to Hide” it is unbelievable, and yet I believed everything that happened in the theater tonight.

I’m inclined to say that this is the best magic show you’ll ever see. In a theater like the Geffen, where you’re used to seeing fictional characters come to life, it’s easy to forget that the duo is not just representative of magicians, but rather the best that magic has to offer: Derek DelGaudio is the Academy of Magical Arts’ Close-up Magician of the Year, and Helder Guimaraes – formerly the youngest ever World Champion of Card Magic – is Parlor Magician of the Year. And, as they say in the show, DelGaudio and Guimaraes aren’t giving us fiction, they’re giving us truth.

“The Eng Bottle” display in the Geffen lobby. It shows how they get the decks of cards into the corked bottles that make up the backdrop for the show.

The feats they perform – and they are feats, not tricks – are what I would call impossible, if I hadn’t just seen them performed before my very own eyes. And on top of that, the banter between shows isn’t just witty chitchat to distract the audience, but meaningful dialogue genuinely worth listening to that may relate to the “trick,” but definitely relates to life. One of their segments dismisses the dream rhetoric used by so many magicians, yet reinvents it in a new context. In an attempt not to give anything away – for giving anything away in the show would be a shame, and yet would spoil nothing because seeing it with your own eyes is so impressive that even if you’d heard what they do you wouldn’t believe it until you saw it – I will say that they ask an audience member to tell a friend “tomorrow” about what they just saw tonight, describing the sequence of events as if it were a dream and asking the friend what they think it means. In that request, I think there’s great genius. An excellent LA weekly cover story (mentioned during the show) talked about how this magic show’s aim is not to get you to ask how, but why. And the aforementioned moment in the show particularly succeeds at prompting that question, a truly unusual question for a magic show to bring up.

The cover of the LA Weekly, November 30-December 6, 2012, that factors into the show.

I had a chance to speak with the magicians after the show, and they couldn’t have been more affable, relaxed or relatable. It was fascinating to hear them reflect on the show. One of the things I found most interesting was how the reactions of even a single audience volunteer – however insignificant it may seem – can really change the tone of the entire show (not the acts, of course, just the feel). Since our conversation was off the record, I won’t quote, but I will say that they gave me the distinct impression that there is a lot more going on than what we actually see. Of course, as magicians are often called illusionists, this should be no surprise, but these two are such great illusionists that it is. It really seems like they’ve got nothing to hide.

Program credits for the show.