Christian Slater says on leaving that he found the show “amazing” and The Pop Wizard “a mysterious man.” “He has been very exciting, very surprising, great,” concludes the actor from The Name of the Rose or Mr. Robot, smiling. Although perhaps the most relevant opinion on the debut last night of the Catalan illusionist in New York, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, just a few meters from Times Square, is that of Keith Marston, vice president of facilities at the Shubert Organization, the largest theater holder in Broadway, no less than 17, including the Barrymore. At the beginning of the show, he points out that it is a discreet premiere because they are not used to having foreign companies and El Mago Pop is not known in the country. “We’re going to meet him, see what he does,” he says. At the end of the show, Marston is standing up applauding, excited, and the adjectives pile up: “Incredible”, “dazzling”, “fantastic”, and he summarizes that “it’s not the type of shows we used to have and it’s clear that it can attract another audience to our theaters, we hope it will return soon”.
Of course, if anyone was emotional last night it was Antonio Díaz himself, El Mago Pop, who in front of the standing audience applauding non-stop, bordered on tears on stage: his long-cherished dream has come true and Broadway has finally arrived, although for Now, after a few days of preview performances and last night’s premiere, he will only perform at the Barrymore until next Sunday, although many will be days with double performances in this theater with more than a thousand locations.
Getting dates on Broadway isn’t easy but last night the impression was that he’ll have it much easier next time after wowing the audience and Marston over and over again with impossible teleportation, superhero flying, wall walking and the ceiling, bodies of spectators lying in the void without apparent support, objects that in an amazing way disappeared in full view and appeared in unlikely places and collective games of cards and numbers that caused a sensation and also perplexity and made the audience launch to make all sorts of guesses as to what the trick was.
An audience among which there were Broadway actors but also not a few Spaniards -among them Guillermo Fesser- with whom he played with humor – “I don’t know why people think that because they don’t look at me I don’t see them”, he ironized while looking for volunteers – and who this time between tricks, fireworks and confetti had to speak in English that worked: “This means the world to me. My first premiere on Broadway. Good night, good night, good night,” he started, stressing that there will be more premieres. An audience for which he reinforced the message that always runs through his show in Spanish theaters: “Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t achieve your dreams. Nothing is impossible.”
For the USA, for the country of the American dream, he has placed even more emphasis in the videos that alternate with the numbers of the show on the idea of ??the self-made man, coming from a humble family and city, Badia del Vallès, in which since the beginning of the year the auditorium has been named after him. A child to whom his mother -in the video Carmen Maura- believed that the magic and obsession “with that Chesterfield” would pass, but she was very wrong.
For now, Antonio Díaz knows no limits, something that he emphasizes in the messages of the montage: with images of the Forrest Gump boy or of a bumblebee, that animal that, according to a NASA study, he says, should not be able to fly, it just doesn’t know it and he does, he reminded himself of the importance of words, of not discouraging people in their dreams. Some dreams of which, he pointed out, “the best thing is not to fulfill them, but to have them.” For now, after Broadway, he will return to his Barcelona theater, the Victòria, in October, and another dream will begin in May, his first season at his own theater in Branson, Missouri, a kind of Las Vegas for family entertainment with millions of visitors a year. of which he hopes to conquer a good part.