Jason Ladanye - Live In London Review

Hi, welcome to Real Magic Review, my name is Steve Faulkner and this is La Danny live in London. Before we do this, usual things, please like, please subscribe, please check out cardmagiccourse.com, that's where you can learn all the movies you're ever going to need and more. I've just recorded a load more stuff, out of this world actually, finally recorded that. Why did I take so long to record that and put it on there? So have a look at that and it's a classic, I've really enjoyed revisiting that anyway. But I digress, check out cardmagiccourse.com and do all that good stuff and please tell people about this channel, you know, I'm not saying share it all over social media, but if you want to, that'd be lovely, but if you know magicians that might benefit from it, you know, do let them know. Right, I got this a long time ago, so apologies to Jason for taking a month, it was May he sent it to me this, and I really wanted to see it and the reason I didn't watch it was because I wanted to sit and kind of take my time watching it, because I really like Jason's stuff. I saw him lecture at the session a few years ago and one of my early, early reviews was his Game Changer, his book, which I still love by the way, and these are, I think most of the routines are from here, or versions of them, maybe a couple from his first book, but I'm not totally sure, don't quote me on that. So this is a lecture really, it's a live performance from his theatre show and I think you get about, I don't know, about a 50 minute performance and then you get the, obviously the explanations, you also get a Magic Castle with commentary, which is great, you know, you get to watch him perform at the Magic Castle with a commentary to give you the theory behind it, which is so important, and there's some extra bits and bobs there. So first of all, to run through what you get on this, there are five effects I think, I have got them written down, I'm going to be totally honest, I'm not going to do that thing of pretending to look at, you know, or looking over there like, you know, dreamingly, pretending I'm thinking of something, they're written there. First of all, Nickatime, I love this routine, I love all routines like this, where you get, by the way, he gets people out on stage with him, and he's got a lot of chemistry with these people. Now I do, well, we'll get into that in a minute, Nickatime is a four selections, and once he gets the selections, loses them in the deck, and then he has this whole thing of, he's going to take 60 seconds to find the four aces, and then he's actually going to find their selections as well. And it's part of what I liked about Game Changer is this element of challenge that are in all the tricks. Now some people, which I talked about way back, about Game Changers don't like this, they say it's a challenger spectator, and all that, the way he does it I really like, and on that, again, I have talked about this before as well, he has this kind of arrogance which is, as he says, is part of the performance. It's really important you know that, it's all kind of like this thing of, I don't mess things up, you know, all that kind of stuff is all part of the performance. And when I saw this, and actually all of the routines on this, I did wish I was watching it for an audience of lay people. I always used to find this with Darwin Ortiz as well, is that I kind of would watch him and go, I'd love to see how lay people see this, because not that I would question that, I think it would play stronger, that's what I'm saying for lay people. Because there are certain things that magicians kind of expect, obviously when you put four cards down that are the selections and you can't find them, we know as magicians that there's going to be a kicker, but I think that that stuff would play super strong, and I do wish, I know it's, I don't do it, alright, so this isn't a judgement, but I do wish sometimes that even the Magic Castle or Magic Circle could just get a load of lay people into film just to get that energy that you would feel of that DVD or download, and then you could kind of feel part of the audience and learn as magicians what would play really strong. Because there's, for example, there's a bit where he does like a perfect circular spread on the table, and he does that, he does this lovely, nearly a whole circle, and the cards are just so beautiful, and he does that as a kind of throwaway thing, and you know that if that's in front of lay people, they're just going to be like, wow, and you get that verbal response, then you can play off that, and I know this, because even when you do a normal fan, you know, to lay people, I do this thing where I kind of, when someone's taking a photo, and they always go, they often clap, you know, it's something really beautiful about it, so that's just a little bit of an aside, but an important one, please start making everybody DVDs with lay people in the audience. Right, Jason's Any Card At Any Number, again, great routine, we all love Any Card At Any Number, we won't discuss whether it's the best effect or not, we've all done that, but his version is really, really good, really clean, and importantly, like all of this stuff, it has a whole, this is, he's got a whole build up to it, where he does a, I think it's shuffle tracking routine, and all these things have a gambling feel to them, but importantly, they have a gambling feel to them that works for lay people, I know it's not lay people in the audience, but you know they don't, nobody has to know how to play poker, or bridge, or any of these type of things, so he's got this whole thing of cheating, that anybody could understand that even if they don't play cards. He's got the big stack, which is a stacking routine, when he talks about stacking, and there are, it's similar to the first routine in a way, because it, there's a kicker, a similar kicker at the end, where he's, he's found four cards, and then he's also found, not instead of, but also found the four aces, which again, super strong routine. All of these routines, and I would argue all of the routines in Game Changer, because that's the book I've spent most time with, are commercial, you could take them straight out of the book, straight on to an audience, and in a theatre show, parlour show, anything, and they would play super strong. He scripted these so strongly, these, to the point where, it's not, it doesn't feel scripted where he's, it's like you want to, you don't get any of him, but I do wish sometimes that he'd come off script, and I'm sure he would again, if an audience of lay people, but I love these moments where he's kind of doing script, and again, it feels very much like him, and then there's a little aside bit where you see he kind of breaks script, and I'd like to see a little bit more of that from him, and again, I'm sure we would in different situations. I'm going to come back to Catch Me If You Can, there's a triumph routine, this triumph is super strong, and there, I'll say now, there are things like pharaohs involved here, so this isn't beginner stuff, but that triumph is really, really clever, it's a different take on it, it kind of, and it reminded me how good that Daryl display is, you know, when I see anybody do it, and I haven't seen it for a while, you go, that is really, it's, we forget how good it is, it's such a beautiful display of the card, it's totally disarming, and the way he does it is even more disarming, you can't believe that that, I almost, when I first saw it, I almost felt similarly, very different to when I first saw Daniel Ortiz do his triumph, I was like, how did, how did that happen, even though you can follow it to a certain level, it kind of loses you, and Loyal Eye was this lovely idea of teaching a card trick to them, telling you how it's done, and then saying that he does one shuffling that gets the whole deck in order, and then he can see what card's missing, and he gets the audience to stop him, make sure you stop me when I'm just about to shuffle, tell me to stop shuffling and I'll show you where I am, and of course he does this whole thing of shuffling anyway, and then going, oh, you were too slow, and he does it with a spectator, but it's constant running gag, it feels a bit like the it's behind you thing of a pantomime, you know, the audience start getting involved, and again, I'd love to have seen, with that energy, but Catch Me If You Can, I just think is a, they're all great, but Catch Me If You Can is such a good routine, it's a card to wallet, without it being an ambitious card or anything like that, and one of my favourite out of the book as well, is that you have three games you're playing with the spectator, and there's so much great challenge built into this, you know, they're all response games, three of those games, and he starts saying like, there's a hundred dollars in this, and actually, usually when a magician says that, we go, oh my, of course he's going to lose, but you, I did think there was a moment where you go, well he could, and that's really important with this routine, even though he's not going to, and you know he's not going to, there is a moment where you go, actually he could lose this, because it wasn't quite close, and I really like the way he builds that into it, and I love, I've seen the routine live, and I think that I really want to do it, because I think it would just play so well, and then it finishes with card to wallet, not card to envelope, and all this sort of thing, just a really nice card to wallet, and it all looks great, and when I watched it, I kind of got that little memory of when I first saw card to wallet, and you just undo the thing, it comes out, and it's just lovely, so they're the routines, his teaching's great, what I really like about it is the learning you can get from reading between the lines, that's what I'm trying to say, he's got two people up there for the whole thing, and he always engages them, yes they'll be left for a bit, but he'll always come back to them, and use them, and there's not this fear, even though people have accused him of having this arrogance, by really not understanding what he's doing, because it's clearly part of the thing, he has a respect for his audience members, even though he's ribbing them, and doing all that stuff, and kind of going, oh you should have got me there, and you're keeping me honest, and all this, he's actually got a lot of respect for them, which I really really like, and when he brings people up, they don't feel like props, they feel like part of the show, someone actually said to me, they hate this stuff, and the front cover of the book's really cringeworthy, oh my god, women, and cigars, yeah if it was serious I would agree, but to me, and I don't think I'm wrong, it is kind of purposely, he's building this whole persona, with the car, and the look, and actually when you meet him in real life, he's very down to earth and cool, he isn't like that at all, so that's when you know it's a persona, but I really like this, I've learnt a lot from it, it re-energised me to get back to that catch me if you can routine, because I really really like it, and I think anybody who's a slight of hand card person will get a lot out of this, and saying that, it is not beginner stuff, it's doable, but there are slights involved, there's certain shuffles, there's doubles, a couple of faros, so it's good I think if you can't quite do that stuff, to find routines where you go, actually that's a good reason to learn that, and especially faro wise, it took me a long time to find faro routines, routines that were worth me learning it, but you see this and you go ok, it's a good goal to get to, so if you can't quite do that stuff, maybe it's worth having a look at too. So there we go, Le Danny, live in London, any questions do let me know, and I'll talk about them on the live shows on Thursday evenings, but do like, subscribe, check out the card magic course, and have a great one.