The first time I was in Israel was with the basketball team Barça. And I remember that I read the entire four days of the trip The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. It was a few months before the premiere of the film adaptation made by Jean Jacques Annaud, which has become one of my favorite films in history. That mystery of the murders in a Benedictine abbey in the fourteenth century that must be solved by the Franciscan father William de Baskerville (Sean Connery), who is served as a squire by a young monk named Adso (Christian Slater).
Christian Slater was yesterday on the red carpet at the Ethel Barrimore Theater in New York to witness from row 8, seat 106, the Mago Pop show on opening night. Slater, the Adso from The Name of the Rose, is no longer the boy in the film, he is now a 54-year-old father of a family, with horn-rimmed glasses, a thin scalp and little desire to talk. Producer and actor of the Mr. Robot series, Slater arrives accompanied, at the 47th Street theater, by his agent.
It costs to be a prophet in your land, and more if you are a magician; It is not out of hostility, the worst thing is that it is out of indifference
The actor doesn’t know that I sit right behind him in the audience and I want to shout “penitenziagiteeeee” in his ear, but I don’t because the show is about to start. And it begins with a love song to Barcelona and Badia in the presentation video of Mago Pop.
One of the first tricks (a ring that blows up the audience) ends with Slater shrugging; with the one of the deck of cards with the help of the driver’s license of an American spectator, the actor puts his hands on his head and the one that ends with the magician appearing out of nowhere with an ice cream in his mouth, Christian Slater stands up from the seat literally to cheer for the trick forcing the rest of the room to do the same.
“Amazing” –the actor shouts when the show ends–, observing how Antonio Díaz greets from the stage with tears in his eyes, because if Everest exists for the Pop Magician, yesterday, at eight o’clock in the evening, Broadway time, reached the top.
In the audience was Slater, but also the composers Andrew Lloyd Webber or Lin Manuel Miranda among many other famous people, standing up, giving an ovation to this little boy who makes everything huge.
At the end of the show, the managers of the Broadway theater give him a framed paper with all the actors and actresses who have previously passed through the dressing room that Antonio Díaz occupies these days. Namely, to enjoy and among others… Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy when they performed A Streetcar Named Desire, Anthony Perkins, Rex Harrison, Sidney Poitier, Henry Fonda, Robert Duvall, Mia Farrow, Maggie Smith, Katherine Hepburn, Carol Burnett, Jessica Lange, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel Craig, Cate Blanchett or last year Samuel L. Jackson… Beneath all these legends, the name of the current occupant of the dressing room of the ancient Ethel Barrimore Theater now appears. New York: Antonio Diaz. “This is The Truman Show” –exclaims the magician.
We enter with Toni Clapés in that dressing room full of flowers while the manager of Mago Pop, Pilar Pérez, sobbing with emotion and tension, yells at one of the technicians, “Carlos, Chucky… we’ve made it” . They know what it has cost because nothing has been easy so that nothing is impossible. In fact, contacts with Broadway promoters have already begun to do a season in New York or perhaps perform one day in Las Vegas or who knows.
As it does? New York wonders after his successful and viral appearance on NBC teleporting three people from one place to another in Rockefeller Center. This is when Toni Clapés always answers: “Enjoy the show and stop looking for where the trick is”.
A Clapés who, also moved, demands from Antonio the name of the English teacher who has taught him in record time. “How did you learn it so quickly?” Toni asks between laughs.
And that moment remembers when in The Name of the Rose, Adso (Christian Slater) asks William of Baskerville (Sean Connery): “Master, how many languages do you speak?” And the Franciscan replied: “All languages and none.”
At the moment we will soon see the Pop Wizard on the Jimmy Fallon show. Brutal. Someday we will realize who this guy who calls himself the Magician Pop is. He always costs to be a prophet in your land, and more if you dedicate yourself to magic or illusion. It is not out of hostility, it is out of indifference, that he is worse. Someone take note before we leave because this Pop Magician has taught us that, indeed, nothing is impossible.
2023-08-22 10:39:35
#Sharing #dream #Broadway
