WAY OFF BROADWAY

SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
MARK MITTON’S MAGICAL MODERN VAUDEVILLE.

By Torn Murrin

One of Mark Mitton’s funniest tricks is when he cuts off his tongue. Audiences shriek, laugh or avert their eyes as he takes a pair of scissors to his wriggling, Gene Simmons-like speech organ and tosses the snipped-off piece to the floor. Eventually realizing that the audience can no longer understand his tongueless patter, he re-attaches the piece of flesh—with a stapler! People howl.

Comic magicians are a special breed. Good ones, like Mitton, are as skilled at performing tricks as any other illusionist, but their art is in looking inept while doing them. Instead of the conjurer’s possessing seemingly superhuman powers, the illusion works in spite of the performer. Mark Mitton’s act is a joy; he has great stage presence and can fool people and make them laugh at the same time.

Sporting a bow tie and suspenders as he digs his props out of an old black doctor’s bag, Mitton moves and talks fast, though always with an innocent expression and a congenial manner. He has both the dexterity to pull a flaming torch out of the back of his pants and turn it into a frisky raccoon, and the cool aplomb to invite people onstage to participate in “audience torture.” A friend of Mitton describes his dizzy and guileless performance persona as “someone who looks like he’s chosen the wrong profession.”

The Canadian-born performer, who’s now in his 30s, started doing magic when he was 9 years old. He never liked “cocky magicians” as a kid, preferring the naive quality of someone like Doug Henning, whom he thinks of as “a hippie who actually seemed to believe in his magic.”

Mitton moved to New York in 1983 and began a five-year apprenticeship with the revered sleight-of-hand artist Slydini, who was 83 at the time. “Slydini is my father when it comes to performing,” he says. From the unequaled prestidigitator of coins, cards and cigarettes, Mitton learned more than technique. “Slydini was a vaudevillian,” he says, “and he shared with me the vaudevillian’s love, respect and challenge of performing for an audience. Their work had this real amazing polish and great rhythm, which came from doing four shows a day.”

In 1988, Mitton began gigging all over town at corporate parties, bar mitzvahs and dance clubs like Area. By the early 90’s, he was working by day with the Clown Care Unit (the hospital program of the Big Apple Circus) and performing solo at night.

A few years ago, the term new vaudevillian was coined to describe some performance artists. Mitton seems to fit that term better than most, and it’s clear he has a great respect and love for America’s performers of the past. “When Slydini went into a nursing home for the last three years of his life, we put on these Friday shows for him and his fellow patients,” Mitton recalls. “There were jugglers, belly dancers, all kinds of variety artists. Just before one show there was a problem—the janitors hadn’t put together the stage—and Slydini’s room was this hotbed of discussion and hubbub, changing costumes and excitation. Slydini looked at me and said, ‘This is show business. I love it.’”