Oh, Oh, Oh, It’s Magic: Gene Urban Pulls Lifelong Rabbit out of a Hat

“So 90% of magicians are hobbyists. They don’t perform. They might for a little dinner party at home for a family member, but that’s about it.” Gene Urban is a professional magician – a card-carrying performer and habitue at the storied Magic Castle in Hollywood, and a guy who has traveled the world, his skill set producing incredulous shouts and sudden, wheezing exclamations in several exotic languages. At this moment he is explaining to a civilian (moi) what we might call magician demographics. “At the Castle, there’s probably about three or 400 performing magicians out of the approximately 1,500
magician members.” 

Gene Urban is not a magician of the Doug Henning or David Copperfield species. If you have Gene over to your genteel, candlelit dinner party you won’t have to worry about a Buick materializing in the middle of the room. He’s that scarier kind of conjurer; the close-up magician. Near enough to touch, Urban proffers cards and coins and other magical ephemera right there in the blanched, ordinary light of wherever you’ve been cornered. You stare at his act like a mad penitent, desperate to catch “the trick.” But there is no trick, there is just this laid-back Gene guy flinging figurative grape jelly on your previously pristine and freshly ironed Reality. He’s very, very good.

“So at the Castle, to be a magician member you go through an audition. Then to be a performing member, you go through multiple auditions. And so in the beginning, it’s all about the mechanics of the cards. Then it becomes more about entertainment.” I feel he’s using “entertainment” as a placeholder for something else. Here it comes now. “And at a certain point,” he says, “it becomes about connection.” Gene Urban has the kindly, dolorous eyes of Einstein or Yoda, and he aims them at me. “Because really, this – ” he affects an insouciant flourish of the hands, “ – this doesn’t matter. Can it touch your heart? That’s really what matters.” 

Twenty Swords

Magicians used to look like they’d been sent over by Central Casting; gloves, moustaches, a running soliloquy of quasi-mystical and over-rehearsed patter. Today the best magicians look like your dad’s amiably blabbing golf buddy. Gene Urban’s brand is not that of a glowing metaphysician but of an amused, tentative stranger with a bone-dry wit and the ability to teleport matter. 

“That’s the power of closeup. In a stage show, they’ll put a person in a basket and put 20 swords through it. That’s nothing when you can go like THIS and put a pencil right through a quarter.” He holds up a clearly ordinary quarter, Washington’s bewigged and slightly underbitten profile thumbprint-smudged in the wan afternoon light. Urban pushes a pencil easily through it. I’m staring right at it and the metal allows the pencil through. I try not to visibly gulp but start yammering instead, which is worse. “I don’t know how you do that without being amazed yourself!” I gush idiotically. 

“You’re right,” Urban says with a pleased grin. “The magician has to be amazed.” He reconnoiters. “Bob Fitch is a famous coach in magic. And he was a Broadway actor. He was in the original production of Annie on Broadway.

“And Bob said you have to feel the magic.” Urban describes an early session under Fitch’s tutelage. He holds up the coin again, the one recently pierced with a pencil. 

“We took a coin like this,” Urban says, “and he had us look at it for three hours, until we felt the metal structure of the coin in our DNA. Because if I’m going to make this coin vanish here, I have to believe it vanished. Oh, it’s there! Oh, it’s not! If I don’t feel that, how can you feel it?” 

To do something performative tens of thousands of times – “I’ve never been able to count the number of performances,” Urban says. “But individual sets? Let’s say well over 60,000…” – and still hold on to that thread of wonder, of shared metaphysical empathy? That seems like actual magic. Is that the secret sauce in all this? A delicately choreographed, authentically shared moment of human awe? “It’s what makes the better magicians as good as they are,” Urban says. “Curiosity.”

Post-Enlightenment Prestidigitation 

In the 70s, Gene Urban was a student at UCSB. “I was in the second class of Environmental Studies at UCSB, when Rod Nash was leading the department. I learned transportation policy.” This academic discipline may well be magic’s diametric opposite, but you know how these things go. 

A pal of Urban’s in the dorm room next door was a junior member of the Magic Castle and would periodically show his stuff. “He used to do a little magic, and it was like, oh wow. THAT’S COOL!” Gene began to dabble. “I’m not the rule,” he confesses. “I didn’t start even thinking about magic until I was 19 or 20. In my group of friends, most of the time they started when they were seven, eight years old – in their bedrooms with a little magic book and a deck of cards.” 

Urban was looking for post-college work when the ongoing tax protest – both our country’s foundation and thorn in its paw – showed up to throw a wrench. “Prop 13 came in and there was a freeze with all city, state and county jobs.” In the event, Urban did the only responsible thing. “I went back home to San Diego and started working as a bar magician.” This was not an ancient vocation, but a compelling new one. There were maybe a dozen bar magicians in the known magic realm at that time. Urban trained under one of the tradition’s founders, his present-day mien a carryover of that humor-infused and disarmingly chill miracle-doing. It could be said that few things enliven a metaphysical demonstration like a gin and tonic. 

When through a friend he was afforded the opportunity to try his hand in the trade show circuit, Gene Urban began the journey he is still on today. To date he has performed in China, Thailand, Bermuda, Ireland, Italy, England, Canada, Mexico…you get the idea. There have been lamplit soireés, gilded Biltmore functions, and Friday nights at Satellite in downtown Santa Barbara, where Urban can be found stupefying locals who thought they were only going out for a splash of cabernet. When you least expect it, Gene Urban will bend your matrix. In closeup. 

Urban’s travels and wonderworks have introduced him to a bevy of interesting folk. He spent time with the great Muhammad Ali – a former magic hobbyist himself – at the legendary champ’s house. One evening Urban was performing for some stargazing folks around a beach campfire. “The guy sitting at my 11 o’clock looks over to the guy who’s sitting sitting next to me and goes, ‘…so speaking of magic, Neil – what was it like walking on the moon?”

It’s all about the Wonder. Attempts to banish our anthropological awe with 50 square feet of strenuously expressed equations on a whiteboard? Nope. To we who are not scientists, both Magic and the Wave Function of the Universe are articles of faith. We needn’t pretend otherwise. Do we need magic? It’s actually more protean than that. We want magic.

Seeing how the COVID mess had turned once energetic kids into furtive little phantoms, some years ago Urban began designing an act that lets his timorous patrons do the reveals – with each other. Seeing faces absolutely aglow in the revelation of their own magic powers – what else is there? This conjurer is all heart and couldn’t be happier. “I can see a transformation right there,” he says with some emotion, and a beatific smile. “It’s a lot more fun than fooling them.”