Las Vegas Weekly

November 5, 2008 · 12:02 PM

No illusion — magician-mentalist Keith Barry busy with new Strip show, Ellen’s Really Big Comedy Show

By Robin Leach

Keith Barry, a guest, and a balloon.

Photo: Tom Donoghue

As a 14-year-old growing up in Ireland, Keith Barry picked up a book titled Magic for the Complete Klutz. He was hooked, and 13 years later, he won his own European TV show, Close Encounters, that aired in 28 countries.

In 2004, he appeared on the MTV special Brainwashed and a live Christmas special in 2005. CBS signed him to a four-year, multi-special deal. Now known as “The Druid Master,” he was on a fast track to rising success when he was seriously injured in a car crash in March of last year.

Keith claims he used his hypnosis skills to will himself well again, and, just 10 months ago, he performed in an episode of CSI: Miami -- and in a live British TV special, escaped from a garden shed rigged with explosives after audience members roped him to a chair inside.

Here’s the video of one segment of the special he filmed at the Hard Rock here in Vegas when he bet $1 million against Vivica A. Fox and her girlfriends Tichina Arnold and Regina King:

“Now 2008 is my most exciting year to date,” he told me over dinner at Koi in Planet Hollywood, where he’s appearing in a limited run through the end of the month. He’s hoping its success will bring him back next spring full time with a show on the Strip and a MTV reality series added on from Vegas. Producers from BASE Entertainment, who stage Phantom -- the Las Vegas Spectacular, Jersey Boys and the Wayne Brady shows at The Venetian and the Palazzo, are promoting Keith’s new show.

In the meantime, the illusionist, mentalist and close-up magician has been picked by daytime talk show host and comedienne Ellen DeGeneres to be her first guest on her upcoming “Really Big Big Variety Show” to be telecast by TBS from the upcoming Nov. 23 Comedy Festival at the Colosseum in Caesars Palace. Ellen also has booked the new hypno-magician for several appearances on her daily talk show.

First-niters at his Planet Hollywood run were wowed by his bare-bones tricks and hypnosis skills, including one scary illusion where an unknown audience member is blindfolded (so he’s unaware of what’s going on), and the audience watches in shocked disbelief as his hand is punched down on a solid steel spike! After the show, Keith took off for the Cathouse at the Luxor, just around the corner from rival Criss Angel’s Believe theater, to celebrate!

Keith has performed in Hollywood for Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Harrison Ford and Matthew Perry and has appeared on both Jimmy Kimmel and Sharon Osbourne’s shows. We’ll have an interview with the Strip’s newest magician here at Luxe Life next week, but in the meantime race to see his show. It’s a bona-fide, baffling superhit -- and if you can figure out how on Earth he gets nine different sets of numbers called out from the audience to all match up to the one total number in whatever direction you call the count, please let me know. It’s the first time I’ve ever been completely baffled in my life!

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