Cosentino is the great pretender

“MAGIC is probably the most honest art form in the world,” says Cosentino. So what’s the reality behind his world of illusion?

140927 TWAM EMBARGO FOR TWAM 27 SEP 2014 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION FEE APPLIES Magician Cosentino pic : James Geer Picture...

IN a black, unmarked building on Melbourne’s outskirts, where the air is spiked with the allure of mystery and the spirit of Harry Houdini casts shadows on the walls, the man who would succeed him is showing me a trick.

It’s called The Ambitious Card and it’s famous for having snookered Houdini, still considered the greatest magician of all time. “I’ll run my thumb down the pack; you call stop and pick a random card,” says Cosentino, his long fingers nimbly palming a deck that’s always to hand. I choose the six of hearts — a very ­ambitious card, it seems, for however the deck is tumbled and shuffled and rearranged, it ­continues to sneak its way to the top.

Cosentino is enjoying himself hugely, my bafflement urging him on. Then he goes for the clincher: I crease my chosen card, push it deep into the middle of the pack. He clicks his fingers sharply and my heart skips a beat: the card on top is the four of hearts, not the six. Oh no, he’s blown it. Composing my features, I look up to see the young magician grinning like a Cheshire cat, the six of hearts between his teeth.

“That’s my little spin on it,” he says, ducking his head, a trace of childhood shyness reappearing through the slick, honed veneer. It’s just a flicker. Then — presto chango! — Australia’s superstar illusionist is back. And the patter resumes. “That’s essentially the trick Dai Vernon did to Houdini,” he says, pocketing the cards and leading the way into a cavernous room that serves as rehearsal studio, storage space and museum, part of the new Cosentino HQ constructed to meet the 31-year-old’s growing acclaim.

Houdini, I learn, was shown The Ambitious Card in Chicago in 1919. These days, of course, anyone can go on YouTube and learn all about pinky counts, the faro shuffle, thumb breaks and double undercuts. The legendary escapologist, however, went to his grave never knowing the secret, and Vernon built a career as The Man Who Fooled Houdini. “But Houdini didn’t dabble in close-up magic,” Cosentino says. “If Dai Vernon had been chucked into a box and chained up, I don’t think he could get out.”

Cosentino can get out. Out of straitjackets, handcuffs, leg irons and danger. In 2010, he escaped his shackles in a shark-infested tank at the Melbourne Aquarium — a stunt performed 100 years to the day after Houdini jumped into the Yarra River, similarly shackled from neck to waist. And earlier this year, after a thwarted first attempt in which he ruptured an eardrum, he got out of a locked Perspex sphere plunged 10 metres underwater in a trick called Dropped.

It was a blockbuster stunt, broadcast live on national TV, but it’s not Cosentino’s greatest trick. Nor is the one in which he unshackled himself just in time to avoid his head being turned into a colander by 18 chef’s knives. Or the stunt that saw him straitjacketed and suspended above a flaming set of steel jaws while a thin rope burned. Both good. But not his ­greatest. Cosentino’s greatest trick, the feat that opened up the world and set him on the path to being Houdini’s true heir, was learning to read.

It’s 1995 and Paul Cosentino, as he was then known, is standing out front of his Year 7 class at one of Melbourne’s most prestigious private schools, Wesley College at Glen Waverley. He’s been asked to read aloud — a fear he carries around like a brick in his stomach. “Please don’t pick me, please don’t pick me,” he’d been chanting quietly in his seat moments before. But now here he is, 12 years old, and stumbling over the most basic words as the classroom rings with laughter. Cheeks aflame, the young Cosentino returns to his seat with his self-esteem whittled back to nearly nothing.

“Kids are cruel,” he shrugs now. “But I didn’t read my first word until Year 3. Which meant I couldn’t spell, couldn’t write, couldn’t do presentations. Everyone’s at lunch and I have to do special classes. I hated it, I just couldn’t do it, I don’t know why.” He was taken to see experts, including an optometrist. “I was too embarrassed to say, ‘I can see, but I can’t read the alphabet.’ People just thought I was stupid.”

His learning difficulties turned Cosentino into a shy kid, introverted and friendless. But his mother Rosemary, a school principal, was convinced there was nothing wrong with his intelligence. “I could tell because he had the sparkle in his eyes — as a teacher you can see that sparkle,” she says now. “I didn’t understand why he wasn’t learning to the level he should have been, that was puzzling me.”

One day, Cosentino was at the public library flipping through comic books and games when he became intrigued by a book about magic. He borrowed the book and took it home. “My mum noticed I was spending all this time looking at the pictures in this magic book, all these old vaudeville photos and cool drawings of hands doing funny things with decks of cards,” he says. She started reading the instructions to him, breaking it down, analysing the words, working out how the tricks were done. Cosentino started learning to read. “It was a very different approach to the rote learning at school,” he says. “But I had to do the learning my way.”

Rosemary Cosentino is grateful she was shown that crack in the door. “I now know it was all about engaging him,” she says. “It wasn’t until he discovered something he was good at and wanted to learn about that he became ­motivated. This happens to so many kids in our system; they slip through the cracks because we don’t find out what their passion is and therefore their purpose for learning.” Our education system, she says, would do well to subscribe to US developmental psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which suggests a person’s intellect is too complex to be measured by standardised testing.

Cosentino’s mother introduced him to magic, but it was his father James, a structural engineer, who revealed to him its true possibi­lities. “My first real trick, I made a 20-cent coin disappear for my dad,” he remembers. “Now, my dad was very good at maths and reading and writing; in my world, he’s a genius. So for him to say, ‘How did you do that?’ – he genuinely didn’t know — you can imagine the transfer of power.”

The selfconscious teen was not alone in turning to magic as a coping mechanism, of course. Artists from Steve Martin to Woody Allen have credited magic with helping them build confidence. “A lot of teens get into magic and you can see why,” Cosentino says. “When I was 14, for example, I used to make doves appear. If you strip it back it’s actually pretty amazing — you’re creating life. There’s a lot of power in that, subconsciously. If you think of the basic tricks I did as a kid: making coins appear, which is making money. Birds: controlling life. Eating and swallowing fire. I’m working with the elements! There was a big power rush.”

Cosentino started putting on magic shows for the family, a ­traditional Italian crew who call him Cos and today form part of his professional network. His father and his brother John, also a structural engineer, construct the stage sets and props, while his other brother, Adam, is his tour and stage manager. Cos’s mother and 85-year-old nonna, Elisa, still help out with ­costumes. “He was generally a sensible boy, but I did begin to get worried when he started to eat fire,” says his mother. Only when her son was 21 did she belatedly find out about the tying-Cos-up-and-throwing-him-in-the-pool stunt his brothers assisted with.

A David Copperfield TV show introduced Cosentino to the theatricality of magic, and his inner peacock came out to play. “One Easter I made a sign of my name out of sparklers and lit it up in the fireplace,” he says. Soon he was ­different in a good way. “All of a sudden I’m blitzing everyone at school because I’m not doing a presentation, I’m performing, which I love.”

Cosentino graduated from high school with a very impressive 89.9 university entrance score. He began a business degree at Monash University but deferred in 2002 when he was offered a six‑month contract as resident magician on a cruise ship. The book of magic never was returned to the library.

Cosentino’s story — his “journey” in the eye-rolling parlance of reality TV — first came to the public’s attention while he was competing on Australia’s Got Talent in 2011. He may have lost out to 14-year-old singer Jack Vidgen but his act, an unconventional mix of nail-biting stunts and Michael Jackson-­inspired dance moves, was seen by an estimated three million people and prompted a flood of emails from fans who said they connected with his struggles at school.

Suddenly, he was famous. His act was still the same old-meets-new fusion of straitjacket escapes, card-sharping, spoon-bending and water-tank immersions juiced with pyrotechnics and rock-star choreography. But now, after the years-long slog of being driven around the country by brother Adam from ­suburban schools to shopping centres, sharing motel rooms and making their own sandwiches, he was booking 5000-seat arenas.

Today he is the highest grossing local artist of international tour promoter Live Nation. His prime-time TV specials have been viewed by six million Australians and have aired in more than 35 countries. Cos won Dancing With the Stars in 2013 and shone a national spotlight on his chosen charity, the Australian Literacy & Numeracy Foundation, which has since made him an ambassador. This month, he performed at the Singapore Grand Prix alongside Jennifer Lopez and Robbie Williams.

Magic is an art form that has spawned only a handful of household names. Last year, ­Cosentino joined a roll call that includes David ­Copperfield, Criss Angel and Penn & Teller by winning the Merlin Award for International Magician of the Year — the first Australian to do so. The Merlin, gold like an Oscar, is a rather elegant statue of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. In the conference room at Cosentino HQ, it sits besides the trophy Cos picked up for his Dancing With the Stars win, a gaudy ­disco-ball of a gong that seems to be the space’s only concession to the Las Vegas-style glitz of magic’s cheesier side.

Cos is nothing if not magnificently self-aware. He has a keen appreciation of magicianship’s absurd side, and decided early on what sort of magician he wanted to be: cool and sophisticated, more Broadway than Vegas. Hence, a signature look that can best be described as 1930s-era hobo chic: Johnny Depp meets Al Capone. He has his onstage suits ­custom-made in Italy, but today he’s dressed down in worn jeans, black high tops with chunky gold buckles and a sweatshirt spangled with tiny gold stars. Dyed-green strands of hair poke through a nest of dreadlocks, and two tiny gold rings pierce his sculpted face. The magician typically holds a steady gaze that’s slightly unnerving, but once he begins to show off his new digs, words tumble out in childlike excitement as he rattles off tales about old-school heroes such as Dante, Howard Thurston and Chung Ling Soo.

Pride of place in his office is given over to a yellowing book in a frame: it’s a signed first ­edition of Houdini’s 1924 book, A Magician Among the Spirits. Cos cites The Prestige, a period drama about turn-of-the-century magicians, as his favourite film and the whole place exudes a steampunk vibe, harking back to the grubby romance of gas-lit Victorian London. A giant sphere, centrepiece of the stunt Dropped, hangs from the rafters over a vast display surely conjured up by an interior decorator with a sideline in medieval sadism. Used-once props for other stunts with names such as Breathless and Stabbed sit alongside old magic memorabilia and vaudevillian posters promoting magicians who tried hard to sound Houdini-esque: The Incredible, The Marvellous, The Astonishing. A bed of nails sits atop a besser-block plinth; there are padlocks and heavy iron yokes and a straitjacket. “You can imagine us going through the airport with this stuff,” Cosentino says. Stacks of big-buckled road-cases line one wall. Two semi-trailers are parked outside the mysteriously sign-free black building that Team Cosentino jokingly refers to as “the stealth building”.

Until last month, Cos had been living and working out of his parents’ home in Lysterfield, south-east Melbourne, and a nearby warehouse. He’s happy to have all his gear in one place. “It’s slowly coming together,” he says, climbing into one of two wooden swings, swaying agreeably in tandem. What are those for? I shudder to think. “Oh, they’re just for fun.”

At a certain age, we stop believing that the silver snail-trails at the bottom of the garden are made by fairies. But no one can unshackle the imagination like an escape artist can. “When I was a kid, I had a book that had these vaudeville pictures of Houdini, with handcuffs on his wrists,” Cos says. “I’m thinking, ‘What is he doing and why?’ That’s what captured my imagination as a kid. Then as an adult, I realised he was really a metaphor.”

Houdini, aka Erik Weisz from Budapest via Wisconsin, was a diminutive, muscular figure capable of liberating himself from any number of impossible binds. Milk churns, Chinese water torture cells, galvanised iron coffins — he could beat them all. It was a time when the world was hungry for wonder “and he was that hope”, Cos says. “His claim was that nothing on Earth could hold him prisoner — not chains, not locks, not straitjackets, not people, not government. And that’s a pretty powerful statement.” He leans ­forward in his seat, eyes shining. “I think my fans connect with me because they see themselves in me. I represent that idea that it’s possible to do things that are seemingly impossible. Also, they see that I was a shy boy with low self-esteem and that it’s OK to be the odd one. That’s why I think what I do goes beyond ... tricks.”

Adam Cosentino is two years older than Cos, so in the early days he landed the job of ferrying the teenage magician around. He also mixed the music for the magic shows and helped lug props. “It soon moved on to, ‘Do you mind if I saw you in half?’” Adam laughs. Because Adam has a mild form of cerebral palsy, the brothers would sometimes have to rejig the stage performance to incorporate it, with Cos changing over to his least favourite side to make the illusion work.

No big deal. Cos was used to problem-­solving. “Overcoming the challenges I did at a young age gave me the confidence to think that nothing can stop me,” he says. There were a lot of knockbacks from agents, bookers and promoters who couldn’t think outside the box far enough to envisage a magician putting bums on seats. So the brothers hustled.

They finish each other’s sentences as they recount Cos’s rise to the top: slow, steady, determined, beginning with a 144-seat venue in Portland, Victoria, that sold out in a day. “All we needed was an opportunity and then it snowballed,” says Adam, who has since moved off stage to concentrate on the business side.

Every door that slammed in his face, Cos says, made him more determined. “I’m the guy that’s been told no by everyone, so now if you say no to me it doesn’t resonate. You can’t say no to me because I’ve done things that no one else has done. That’s not arrogance — that’s a guy who’s been beaten down and he’s proved people wrong and he’s frustrated. ‘You can’t have a TV show.’ Well I did. ‘You can’t have your own magic products.’ Well I did. ‘Your shows can’t air overseas.’ Well they did. That makes me keep pushing. I’m pretty tenacious.”

An attractive brunette pokes her head through the doorway and gives a little wave. Priscilla Stavrou, a professional dancer, replaced Adam as Cos’s onstage assistant in 2011. She’s the only other person who knows what’s up his sleeve. She is also his girlfriend, part of a long tradition of partner-as-sidekick going back to Bess Houdini. “I feel a little bit bad about it to some degree,” says Cosentino. “Like, ‘Oh really, do I have to follow that cliche?’ But it’s textbook for a reason. This is the first time in a relationship that I can connect properly, because she knows my secrets.”

Adam’s three-year-old son Georg, one of Cos’ six nieces and nephews, wanders into the rehearsal space with a white silk handkerchief pressed to his eyes. It’s a magic trick common enough to children: If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. Visiting Uncle Cos is fun. Cos gets a lot out of it too. “When I show Georg the most basic trick, he automatically assumes it’s magic. The coin disappears. He’s got no other explanation: it’s magic. If I show an adult the same thing, they know it is a trick, and try to work out the method or the secret. A child doesn’t see that.”

When thinking up new material for his act, Cos tries to tap into this mindset, heading into a specially constructed hidey-hole under the stairs; it’s all-black, with beanbags for dreaming on, and a white ceramic rabbit standing ­sentinel. “In my latest show I did a piece where I put up a door and you could see both sides and I melted straight through it,” he says. “Now that idea didn’t come from me — one of my nephews wanted to see me walk through a wall.”

But how to keep your inner child alive in a cynical world? He laughs, and looks around him. “You build yourself a factory where you can be as creative as you want,” he says. “You create a team around you and an environment that allows you to be free. My profession is magic and make-believe, so if I’m not ­creative who will be? It’s not my lawyers, I can tell you that.”

The romance of the inexplicable is as strong as it ever was, says Cos. People delight in magic as much as the crowds who gasped when Houdini made a fully-grown elephant vanish from a New York stage in 1918. “The majority of people come to my shows wanting to be entertained and baffled,” he says. “You do get people commenting on forums saying, ‘You can’t really do that; that’s not real.’ Are you kidding? I just told you it’s not real, that it’s an illusion. I told you that it’s smoke and mirrors. But the question is: Was it done well?

“Magic is probably the most honest art form in the world — I tell you I’m going to deceive you but that you’re going to enjoy it. There’s nothing more honest than that. I’ve done TV, I’ve done radio — you think my world’s an illusion? Boy oh boy, that’s a whole other thing.”

In the latter part of his career, Houdini took to debunking spiritualists and mediums, and their claims of being able to contact the dead. “Applesauce and hogwash,” he called it. He took particular issue with his friend, Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, an ardent spiritualist who was convinced Houdini’s escapes were due to a “divine” gift. Cosentino shares Houdini’s disdain for psychics and ­fakers. But magic is not intellectual; it’s emotional. And in an age when technologies manage the seemingly impossible in everyday life, there’s a place for the flesh-and-blood magician who grants us, perhaps for just an instant, the heady thrill of witnessing a miracle.

“I’m not taking people’s money and lying to them and saying, ‘I can talk to your husband who’s passed’ or ‘Let me read your future’,” he says. “But I want people to believe. Because if you think it’s real in that moment, it gives you a sense that maybe anything is possible. ”l