Two-time Fool Us winner Vitaly Beckman has spent pandemic lockdown creating new artful illusions
The magician who pulled one over on Penn & Teller spends months developing original acts that draw on paintings, sketches, and photographs
The Anvil Centre presents Vitaly: Evening of Wonders on December 22 as part of Shine Bright New West
VITALY BECKMAN has performed some big shows over the past few years. He’s outwitted Penn & Teller—twice!—on Fool Us, he’s closed their Vegas show, and he’s hosted his own off-Broadway hit Vitaly: Evening of Wonders, his face emblazoning a giant billboard in Times Square.
But today the upbeat local artist who’s known for making people’s faces disappear from their driver’s licence and transforming drawings of leaves into real, three-dimensional foliage is pretty stoked about his latest venue: New Westminster’s Anvil Centre.
“It’s the first time I’m doing a show 10 minutes walking from my home!” he enthuses.
Beckman has been touring again, at least while the world temporarily opened up again, with several gigs south of the border in the last few months. Before that, during pandemic lockdown, he was busy developing new sight- and logic-defying marvels. The Anvil audience will be some of the first to see his new creations: he hints there are now three-dimensional sculptures, lit matches, and an oil painting involved. Developing his complex illusions is an arduous, time-consuming process, he explains.
“It really takes years to fully perfect new pieces of magic. It’s not just ‘I have an idea. Okay, done!’” he says. “You can’t find a guidebook to do it. I have to imagine it and I have to polish it. It’s a long process and it’s really satisfying when it finally works.”
The fact that Beckman’s acts are so out-of-the-box artistic is what helped him fool Penn & Teller, who are walking encyclopedias of classic magic acts. In 2016 he tricked them with an elaborate spin on the “guess the card” trick that involved revealing the card in a shot in a photo album. In March 2021, he was able to fool the famed magicians again, streaming by video from B.C. and mindblowingly drawing a coffee mug and muffin that came to life on the table behind his sketchpad.
“One of the reasons I fooled Penn & Teller with this is there was so much going into it that, even if they guessed part of the method, they couldn’t guess all of it,” Beckman explains. “It looks so simple and it was one of the hardest things to pull off. People don’t realize how much work is under the surface—a little like an iceberg.”
That originality has allowed Beckman to make a major name for himself—the achievement of a dream he’s had since he was a kid. Raised in the Soviet Union, and then Israel, he says he realized he wanted to devote his life to performing magic sometime around 13 or 14, when he’d entertain his parents’ friends.
“In my 20s, my dream was the American dream; to be on Broadway and tour the world,” says the performer, who jokes onstage that he “sounds like Borat and looks like Seinfeld”. The nearest he could get to that leaping-off point was immigrating to Canada’s West Coast 13 years ago.
“I moved as close as I could to the U.S.,” he explains. “I had a brother in Vancouver who’s a computer scientist.”
From here, he continues to hone work that not only often includes art but is art to Beckman—who was painting and sketching long before he turned to magic.
“Every artist is an illusionist in a way,” he says. “To me, life is a work of art.”
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