A Shoddy Magician in a Parking Lot – Fringe 2018 Reviews

The Fringe Festival was created in order to promote shows on the far edges of the performing arts scene, and nothing embodies that better than a show performed entirely in the parking lot of a theatre.

Canadian comedian Steve Boleantu has crafted a masterpiece of cringe humour with his latest show, A Shoddy Magician in a Parking Lot. Sticking tightly to the title concept, our magician works out of a powder blue hatchback to a crowd assembled under a sun tent in the private lot next to the Staircase Theatre’s rental space. In a scuffed, dingy tuxedo with a cheap microphone in his hand, he mumbles into a blown-out speaker while performing the sort of illusions one might find in a My First Magic Show kit in the clearance aisle of a toy store.

Steve plays his character so straight and with such well-timed bad timing that there was a palpable blanket of discomfort throughout the audience of the debut performance, the unsuspecting crowd waiting for a traditional punchline that never came. And when it ended, there was a stunned silence followed by several minutes of confusion before it became clear that the show was, in fact, over.

I have never enjoyed a show the way I enjoyed A Shoddy Magician in a Parking Lot, and I suspect I never will again. Highly recommended.

A Shoddy Magician in a Parking Lot

Staircase Theatre, 27 Dundurn St N, Hamilton, ON L8R 3C9