Sleights of Hand With Cards, Coins and a Colander

NEW YORK — Recently, I saw back-to-back magic shows, willingly: Joshua Jay’s darling “Six Impossible Things” and Vitaly Beckman’s gawkier “Vitaly: An Evening of Wonders.” Cutlery was mangled, socks were matched, psychic Pictionary was attempted and achieved. Just once, I chose a card.

Even in a moment when “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is a hot seller, it is vaguely shaming to like magic. I should have grown out of it by now. Like sour gummies or glitter nail polish. Magic feels so unevolved, so old-school. Its practitioners are mostly male and mostly white. Some of them try to be sexy, which is a disaster, or mysterious, which is not any better. But here is the thing: Life has a lot of surprises, many are unpleasant. If you can guarantee an evening in which all the shocks are happy ones and somehow cup-and-ball related, I am in.

I found Jay’s show down a narrow flight of stairs at the tip of Canal Street. Twenty guests had assembled in a red-lit room that looked like the foyer of a hipster bordello. On a recent Friday, the mood was tremulous, the air scented with cinnamon and enigma. At showtime, bedsheets the gray of a laundry accident were distributed and more or less willingly slipped on, ghost-style. (In this national moment, is dressing up in sheets a good look?) After only a little more inanity, Jay himself appeared.

Jay has a reputation as a scholar, an inventor and a champion of the kid magician set. Some unfortunate promotional photographs had suggested he might go the sexy route, but thankfully he arrived sporting a Henley shirt and a slightly goofy grin, looking like a fraternity pledge who had just dashed in from crew practice. Following a wicked trust-building exercise, he sent the audience merrily marching through a series of small basement rooms, counting off the illusions, a few of them loosely inspired by “Alice in Wonderland.” We are all mad here.

There are several nice things I could say about Jay. Here is the nicest: I spent a little over an hour in his company and I never noticed his hands. Jay does have hands, two of them, each with the average number of fingers. (One of those hands, briefly mangled in a boating accident, has since recovered.) But his sleights were accomplished so casually and expertly and with such cheerful misdirection that the hands themselves — what Jay calls “the secret ballet of fingers” — never caught the eye.

“Six Impossible Things,” directed by Luke Jermay, is billed as an immersive magic show and there is some publicity claptrap about how each guest will “be admitted JUST ONCE.” Really, it is only a touch more participatory than a typical parlor or close-up show. Most of the tricks are slight though clever variations on the usual card and coin and rope routines. A couple are perfectly possible. But Jay’s affect is so friendly, his crowd work so gentle and his outfit so seemingly devoid of pockets that it does feel intimate.

Paradoxically, disenchantment flickered only during the coziest moment (OK, that moment and also the bedsheet bit), a one-on-one performance in which he had promised to deliver the “perfect illusion” that exists for each of us. Mine was a harmless bit of shadow puppetry, some low-key telekinesis that was over in an instant. Maybe if I sneak back in, we can try again.

If “Six Impossible Things” feels like an indie band’s secret show, “Vitaly: An Evening of Wonders” feels more like classic rock for the cruise-ship set. Beckman also suffers from a misguided Playbill photo, part come hither, part leaf blower. But when he opens his mouth — after a wordless trick involving a bowl of apples that vibrates when he nears, much like a fruit-based theremin — he is toothy and jokey, charisma-proof, but somehow likable. “I sound like Borat and I look like Seinfeld,” is how he puts it.

He likes to inhabit a place “where imagination meets reality,” he said, but often it feels more like a place where off-strip Vegas meets past-sell-by stand-up. His actual place: The Westside Theater, a chutzpah-ish two blocks from the “Harry Potter” crew. At a Saturday show, patter was straight-up terrible, with gags about controlling wives, doctors’ handwriting and van Gogh’s ear. (Those bits are co-credited to Doug Bennett. Accio script doctor!) If several of the tricks feel original, nearly all of them feel hokey.

Is that because of the workaday materials he uses? Just how magical can a paintbrush be? Or a water bottle? Or a fruit bowl? Well, Jay at one point puts a repurposed colander to dazzling effect, so probably pretty magical. Still, without giving too much away, you should know that Beckman has a deft and surprising way with Photoshop. If you are ever longing for a sorcerous way to improve the picture on your driver’s license, he is definitely the magician to call.

Ultimately, it is less an evening of wonder, than an evening of “Hunh? OK.” Those boy wizards down the street can breathe easy.

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“Six Impossible Things”

Through Dec. 15 at Wildrence, Manhattan; siximpossiblethingsshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

“Vitaly: An Evening of Wonders”

Through Sept. 30 at Westside Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, eveningofwonders.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.