The Chicago magic bar scene is a vibrant and entertaining part of the city's nightlife. Magic bars are venues that specialize in providing live magic performances, often combined with food and drinks. These establishments offer a unique and exciting form of entertainment that combines the skills of sleight of hand, illusion, and showmanship. One popular magic bar in Chicago is The Magic Parlour, located in the Palmer House Hilton Hotel. It offers an intimate and elegant setting for guests to experience magic up close. The performances are led by the resident magician, who dazzles the audience with mind-bending tricks and illusions.
Inside Chicago Magic Lounge, Mixing Drinking and Deception in Andersonville
Ashok Selvam is the editor of Eater Chicago and a native Chicagoan armed with more than two decades of award-winning journalism. Now covering the world of restaurants and food, his nut graphs are super nutty.
Chicago Magic Lounge debuts its main stage tonight in Andersonville, giving the city one of its most-unique drinking and entertainment venues. It’s part speakeasy thanks to a full bar with Art Deco touches. It features signature cocktails and small bites, as ownership touts that they consulted with a food and beverage professional involved with a Michelin-starred restaurant. The main attraction is the magic — the lounge features a 120-seat and 43-seat theater. Ownership wants to make the magic lounge a destination for national-touring performers and establish the magic equivalent of what Second City is for Chicago’s improv comedy community.
Architect David Burns, who died last month after endearing himself to Chicagoans for his work at Steppenwolf and the Lookingglass theatres, helped design the space. He also designed Temporis, the West Town tasting-menu restaurant with lit booths that change colors. Magic Lounge named the speakeasy portion David’s Lounge as tribute. Magicians will perform behind the bar and at the two theaters.
Patrons enter through the doors and pass through an unassuming laundromat. There are a couple secret doors throughout giving the space a sense of exploration. There’s also a library filled with trinkets and magic resources. A library cabinet also features a deck of cards that appears to float and spin.
Customers have options. They can stay in the bar and eat and drink. They can buy a ticket to the main theater to see magic or listen to music — the Magic Lounge will also host jazz shows. Maybe they’ll augment their night with some champagne or truffles from Katherine Anne Confections. Maybe the pork belly sliders are enough to satiate.
Though they have all disappeared and shuttered, Chicago has a history of magic bars. Chicago Magic Lounge wants to conjure a spell and awaken that tradition. Stroll through the space below. Chicago Magic Lounge is open.
Chicago Magic Lounge, 5050 N. Clark Street, 312-366-4500, check calendar for show dates and tickets, David’s Lounge open 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. daily. Venue is 21+, but children 16 and older can gain admittance with parent or guardian.
There’s nothing to see here, move along.
The neon sign reads “misdirection.”
Guests enter the speakeasy through an unassuming laundromat.
The Blackhawk sweater adds authenticity.
They did not skimp on the details.
A view of the speakeasy.
Magicians will perform behind the bar in the center.
The bar’s named after David Burns, the architect who died while designing the lounge. He’s also done projects including Temporis in West Town.
Don Alan hosted his own TV show, Magic, and was a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
The bar area has several seating options including this plush bench.
The library’s books provide a refined atmosphere.
This area should be a little bit quieter compared to the main bar.
Another bar smart enough to have a fireplace.
The Great Gaymond (Maurice F. Raymond) made his name in the early 20th Century.
More trinkets add character to the room.
Yes, this deck of cards is floating.
More thoughtful details on the shelves.
Max Maven headlines opening week at the main theatre.
Max Maven will help bring cocktails and card tricks together.
A view from the mezzanine level of the 120-seat theatre.
The theatre will host magic and music.
The owners hope to make this a destination for nationally touring magicians.
Enter the 43-seat 654 Club.
This space is meant to showcase close-up magic tricks in a smaller setting.
Check out the many vintage posters on the wall.
The shows at the 654 Lounge are shorter than ones at the main stage.
More decorations on the walls.
Smoke and Mirrors (El Buho Mezcal, Amaro Montenegro, Letherbee Fernet) Barry Brecheisen
Abracadabra (El Tesero Platinum, Lime Juice, Luxardo Maraschino, Simple Syrup, Creme de Violette)
How Houdini Died (Parce 8 Year, Rhum JM 80, Aperol, Lime Juice, Pineapple Juice, OJ, Iced Tea, Angostura Bitters)
Chicago magic bar
Magician Jeremy Pitt Payne entertains at the Chicago Magic Lounge, which currently offers two-nights-a-week shows at the Uptown Underground. Come December, it’ll be a full-time operation in a new, three-space venue at the site of an commercial laundry in the 5000 block of North Clark Street. (Chicago Magic Lounge )
ImageComing this year to 5050 N. Clark St. on Chicago’s North Side: A new entertainment venue, replete with food and beverages, that’s dedicated to the art of close-up magic.
There’s a history of such places in and around town. In the 1930s, Ryan’s Magic Tap occupied the corner of Division Street and Mayfield Avenue. There was the New York Lounge on Irving Park Road, a joint that lasted for 40 years. There was a bar called Little Bit O’ Magic on South Pulaski Road (it had various addresses). You could watch magic in Berwyn at Mr. C’s Magic Lounge. The Magic Touch in Palatine (which was owned by Tom Locascio) proudly declared that it hosted magic seven nights a week.
Especially beloved in this eccentric little segment of Chicagoland nightlife was Houdini’s Pub in Oak Forest, a 1980s venue owned by a magician named Tom Balsewich and that featured performances by Bill Malone, the chief bartender and a magician who, the Tribune reported at the time, could be found at Houdini’s seven nights a week. Malone told the newspaper he cut his magician’s teeth at Little Bit O’ Magic, being as one club tends to lead to another.
Or did. Magic hardly has disappeared from Chicago. Dennis Watkins (of House Theatre of Chicago fame) has a long-standing gig in a room at the Palmer House Hilton; that terrific show is titled “The Magic Parlor.” The physician-magician Ricardo Rosenkranz recently closed a fine magic show at the Royal George Theatre’s cabaret. There’s a Wednesday night magic show called The Magic Cabaret at the Greenhouse on Lincoln Avenue.
But there is not, to the very best of my knowledge, a magic bar left in Chicagoland.
The Chicago Magic Lounge already exists, but just as a two-nights-a-week show at the Uptown Underground theater. But beginning around Dec. 1, the Chicago Magic Lounge becomes a full-time, three-space venue for magic, with a 120-seat cabaret theater (shows will be ticketed) replete with a mezzanine level. There also will be a separate, 40-seat “close-up room,” to be dubbed the 654 Club, an homage to a classic magic number.
“We hope for a full week of magic programming in the cabaret,” said co-founder Joey Cranford. “There also will be a 1920s-style, speakeasy-type bar that will have a magician at the bar seven nights a week.”
So why does Cranford think he can make a go of a branch of entertainment that appears to have pretty much vanished?
“This project is about a passion to rebuild a community and give the members of that community somewhere to go,” Cranford says. “Magic is such a solo art; there is nowhere in town for magicians to gather, unless you want to hang out in a magic shop in the middle of day and drink bad coffee.”
Cranford, a loquacious historian of live variety shows in Chicago, says his mission for The Magic Lounge is twofold. He wants to foster the Chicago magic community (in the style of the Magic Castle in Los Angeles or the Magic Circle in London) and to introduce the public to a style of a close-up magic that he claims was invented in Chicago in 1915 by a man named Matt Schulien (Bob Schulien, Matt’s grandson, is on Cranford’s roster of magicians).
“Before Schulien, nobody had ever done card tricks before in an intimate setting,” said Cranford, although he acknowledged that Harry Houdini had done some card tricks on a midway at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.
Cranford (and his partner, Donald Clark Jr.) will own and run the lounge, which is being built on the 6,000-square-foot site of a commercial laundry, although the building long has been unmarked.
Come December, there will be a sign on the door. And, Cranford says, multiple secret entrances.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Chicago Magic Lounge – Serious magic… & cocktails
For work, I am a custom prosthetics specialist. I love Chicago and its neighborh.
A tiny sign appears above the door of a nondescript building with frosted windows. No words, just an icon of a washing machine. When that door is unlocked, you’re free to walk in. I won’t tell you exactly what happens next because, that’s part of the magic. Don’t worry, it’s harmless. Eventually, you’ll find yourself in the foyer bar of the Chicago Magic Lounge.
Beyond the foyer/bar area is a large theater for scheduled performances of bewildering magic! The scheduled shows require tickets, but they also do magic right at the bar, and it’s free! In the middle of the bar is a green tabletop and a magician perched behind it. Flanking the magician, waiters clad in tie and vest are mixing up cocktails, which from my experience are not for the weak. Lights are kept low, giving off a vintage glow to mingle with the gold accents of art deco fixtures behind the bar.
Magics sets at the bar are about 15-20 minutes, spaced apart by a 5-ish minute magician’s break. I’ve stayed long enough to see several sets and it’s worth seeing a few. The magicians don’t repeat tricks and you might get roped into participating after awhile. They say magic is all about perception, perhaps much of it is, but I still can’t figure out how ten bunnies emerged from my closed hand after the magician had only placed one in my palm before closing my fist. No doubt you’ll be stumped too!
The Chicago Magic Lounge provides a new home for old tricks
During the golden age of Chicago magic, from the 1930s through the 1960s, there were more than a dozen spots around the city where one could witness a trick or two. “Through my research, I’ve found 15 total,” says magician and magic-history buff Joey Cranford, rattling off a litany of long-gone venues: Mr. C’s in Berwyn; Johnny Paul’s Magic Lounge in Cicero; Little Bit O’ Magic on the South Side; the New York Lounge in Lincoln Square. But none of these, Cranford notes, was a proper theater. “Chicago really didn’t have theaters built for magic. We had bar magic, restaurant magic.”
Bar magic—otherwise known as close-up magic or tableside magic—is Chicago’s contribution to the field, performed by prestidigitators who might also have poured your drinks, as the loquacious Cranford (also a former improviser and Chicago tour guide) tells it. That style of in-your-face hocus-pocus is center stage at the theater he created just for it: the Chicago Magic Lounge.
Cranford’s Magic Lounge has existed for the past few years as not a space but a show with a rotating lineup, most recently playing two nights a week at Uptown Underground (see page 24). But with the eager assistance of Cranford’s business partner Donald Clark Jr., a magic enthusiast who saw the show at UU and offered to invest, the Chicago Magic Lounge opened in February as a brick-and-mortar venue in Andersonville.
The new theater is split into three performance spaces. The front bar is open to the public, with a built-in magician’s table for informal shows seven nights a week. Tickets are required for shows in the main room, the luxe, 120-seat Blackstone Cabaret (an homage to the pioneering father-and-son magicians Harry Blackstone Sr. and Jr.). You can catch a more intimate after-show in the 43-seat 654 Club, named for a well-known card routine.
The last of the old magic bars, Cranford says, was Schulien’s, a German restaurant on Irving Park Road in North Center, where three generations of the Schulien family did tricks behind the bar for more than eight decades before it closed in 1999.
Luckily, Chicago hasn’t gone without magic in the years since. The performances just moved into different spaces: Magicians such as David Parr, Benjamin Barnes and Neil Tobin have concocted shows in traditional theaters like Stage 773 and the Greenhouse Theater Center, while young practitioners such as Jeanette Andrews and Mark Toland have taken their talents to the Museum of Contemporary Art and ACTIVATE’s pop-up parties.
Meanwhile, actor-illusionist D ennis Watkins has made his one-man show, the Magic Parlour, a long-running staple at the Palmer House Hilton, and Nick Roy has transformed his monthly Magic Penthouse event into a hot ticket in the Loop. And erstwhile street magician Aaron Rabkin opened his own magic parlor, Trickery Chicago, in a small Boystown storefront last fall (beating Cranford by a few months).
Rabkin, a Los Angeles native, traces his performance roots to that city’s Magic Castle, the legendary private clubhouse that Cranford cites as one of his two chief models for how to best cultivate Chicago’s magic community. The other? Chicago’s own comedy theater, iO. “In the improv world, iO was our hub. You had a playground to be around other improv folks,” says Cranford. “I want [the Magic Lounge] to be a beacon for Chicago magic. Magicians have performed on everyone else’s stages; I want them to perform on a stage built for magic.”
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The performances are led by the resident magician, who dazzles the audience with mind-bending tricks and illusions. The Magic Parlour has received rave reviews for its high-quality performances and immersive atmosphere. Another notable magic bar in Chicago is The Chicago Magic Lounge.
This venue has a retro vibe, reminiscent of the golden age of magic. The Chicago Magic Lounge provides a speakeasy atmosphere, featuring multiple rooms with different magic shows happening simultaneously. Guests can enjoy a variety of magic acts, from close-up card tricks to grand stage illusions. The Chicago Magic Lounge also offers a full menu of food and drinks, creating a complete night out experience. The beauty of magic bars in Chicago is the ability to witness extraordinary feats of magic right before your eyes. Unlike watching a magic show on television or in a large theater, a magic bar provides a more intimate and interactive experience. Guests can actively participate in the magic tricks, making the performances even more memorable. Moreover, the Chicago magic bar scene isn't limited to just these two venues. The city is also home to several other magic bars and clubs, each with its own unique style and atmosphere. From upscale establishments to more casual hangouts, there is a magic bar in Chicago to suit every taste. Overall, the Chicago magic bar scene offers a one-of-a-kind entertainment experience that combines magic, food, and drinks. Whether you are a magic enthusiast or simply looking for a fun and memorable night out, visiting a magic bar in Chicago is sure to leave you spellbound..
Reviews for "The Art of Deception: Chicago's Thriving Magic Bar Scene"
1. Samantha - 2 stars - I was really excited to visit the Chicago magic bar, but I was extremely disappointed. The drinks were overpriced and weak, and the magic tricks were lackluster. The performers seemed disinterested and there was no wow factor at all. The atmosphere was quite dull and there wasn't much audience interaction. Overall, it felt like a waste of money and I wouldn't recommend it to others.
2. Thomas - 1 star - I had high expectations for the Chicago magic bar, but it fell short in every aspect. The service was slow and the staff seemed unorganized. The magic tricks were basic and I've seen more impressive performances on YouTube. The ambiance was nothing special and the whole experience felt underwhelming. I wouldn't recommend wasting your time and money at this place.
3. Emily - 2 stars - The Chicago magic bar was a huge letdown for me. The seating was uncomfortable and cramped, making it difficult to enjoy the show. The magicians lacked charisma and their tricks were predictable. The drinks were average and the prices were definitely inflated. Overall, it wasn't worth the hype and I wouldn't go back.
4. Brian - 2 stars - I was expecting a night of mind-blowing illusions and thrilling entertainment at the Chicago magic bar, but was left disappointed. The magicians seemed amateurish and their tricks were easy to figure out. The venue was small and crowded, making it hard to fully enjoy the performances. The overall atmosphere was dull and lacked the excitement I was hoping for. I wouldn't recommend this place to anyone seeking a truly magical experience.