Magician Hot Springs is a geothermal wonder located in the eastern part of California's Sierra Nevada mountain range. It is a popular destination for visitors seeking relaxation and therapeutic benefits from the warm and mineral-rich waters. The hot springs get their name from the Native American legends that describe them as a sacred place where shamans and magicians would go to heal and recharge their energy. The surrounding area is known for its mystic vibes and has been considered a spiritual site for centuries. The water in Magician Hot Springs is naturally heated by geothermal activity deep beneath the earth's surface. As it rises to the surface, it brings with it a variety of minerals, such as sulfur, calcium, and magnesium.
Maxwell Blade Theatre of Magic
Prepare to be mystified and amazed! The Maxwell Blade Theatre of Magic features the magic of Maxwell Blade and cast of 12 as they perform two mesmerizing hours of large-scale illusions, close-up magic, comedy, and live music played on piano by the grand illusionist! The show is family-friendly and performed in a 300-seat state-of-the-art venue. Come see why audiences are calling The Maxwell Blade Show “Dazzling,” “Artistic,” “New and different,” “Captivating,” and “Personal and Touching.”
The Historic Malco Theatre & The Malco Lounge & Parlor
Located on the corner of Central Avenue and Chapel Street, the historic Malco Theatre was built in 1910 on a site that once housed silent films and vaudeville acts. In 2016, Maxwell Blade announced, “We are coming home to the Malco Theatre.” The building was completely renovated with new seating, art deco interiors, a digital marquee, and a sound and lighting system to match any theatre in the country today. With a larger stage, Maxwell Blade was able to add cast members and expand his production to the amazing proportions that wow audiences today. Waiting for the main event? Enjoy the charming allure of the Malco Lounge over a beer or glass of wine from the bar or, go beyond the walls to the Parlor for mind-blowing close-up illusions, sleight of hand and mentalism. Both venues are available for rentals and various types of live performances can be added to private events.
You think you've seen every trick in the book? Think again! Welcome to the unbelievable and mystifying world of Maxwell Blade.
Maxwell Blade (1962–)
Maxwell Blade is an illusionist and comedian based in downtown Hot Springs (Garland County) is a well-known attraction. He began holding Maxwell Blade’s Festival of Magic in 2013 and undertook the restoration of the city’s historic Malco Theatre.
Maxwell Blade was born on January 24, 1962, in Fort Smith (Sebastian County). As a child in the 1970s, he became interested in magic after watching magician and comedian Mark Wilson’s Funny Face Magic Show and Magic Circus on television. He began learning and practicing simple magic tricks as a hobby, in addition to teaching himself to play drums and piano. When he was eight years old, he began playing music at a local church. He graduated from Greenwood High School in Greenwood (Sebastian County) in 1980. When he was twenty-one, he auditioned for a rock band called Exit Five, who later changed its name to Shark Avenue. The group recorded an album and toured for several years.
Blade began a career as a full-time magician in 1991. Drawing inspiration from Mark Wilson, Harry Houdini, Elton John, and David Copperfield, he performed in clubs in northwestern Arkansas and as an opening act for local bands under the direction of his manager at the time, Dick Renko. On August 4, 1994, Blade’s first large-scale production debuted at the King Opera House in Van Buren (Crawford County). That show was dedicated to his mother; she died from Lou Gehrig’s disease on August 11. The King Opera House show was followed by a two-year tour.
Per an interview with the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, Blade and his family visited Hot Springs in 1995. On August 28, 1996, his show moved into the historic Malco Theatre at 817 Central Avenue. He began performing there in the Maxwell Blade Theatre of Magic with his wife, Cathy, and their two daughters, Courtney and Alexis, who were two years old at the time. In 2003, his youngest daughter, Gabrielle Blade, was born, and she later joined the show. The Blade family continued performing at the Malco until 2008, when they moved into smaller venue on 121 Central Avenue.
In the fall of 2013, Blade began the annual Maxwell Blade Festival of Magic with the help of other well-known magicians: Jay Scott Berry, Derrick Rose of Little Rock (Pulaski County), Jeff McBride, and Michael Ammar. The first festival consisted of events in a dozen venues in Hot Springs. In 2015, Blade purchased the property adjoining his Victorian-style theater and converted the space into the Maxwell Blade Museum of Curiosities to house his large collection of magic-related artifacts and medical curiosities. Local antiques dealer Davis Tillman also puts artifacts on display there. Among the many items on display is a model ship built by prisoners of war during the Napoleonic Wars; the ship’s rigging is said to be made completely out of human hair. Other pieces include a mummified cat named Felix, medical tools, a child-sized coffin, an electric chair, wooden dolls, Houdini handcuffs and promotional posters, circus photographs, and a re-creation of a mortuary drive-through viewing window. (The building housed the Ledwidge Mortuary from around 1900 to 1935, and the mortuary had a window so people could pay their respects to the recently deceased.)
In September 2016, Hot Springs’ Sentinel-Record reported that Blade was “going home” to the Malco Theatre at the end of his twentieth season. Blade invested in restoring and renovating the aging theater to suit his needs. He held the grand re-opening of the theater on December 8, 2017, and it is now home to the Maxwell Blade Theatre of Magic & Comedy.
For additional information:
“Hot Springs Magician Has Museum of Oddities.” Sentinel-Record, March 23, 2015.
Maxwell Blade. http://www.maxwellblade.com/ (accessed August 20, 2020).
Newton, Tanner. “Magician Celebrates Time in Hot Springs.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, August 23, 2021, p. 2B. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/aug/23/magician-celebrates-time-hot-springs/ (accessed August 23, 2021).
Wells, Lindsey. “Maxwell Blade ‘Going Home’ to Historic Malco Theatre.” Sentinel-Record, September 21, 2016, p. 1A.
Cody Lynn Berry
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
The Magic Touch: Maxwell Blade Thrills Hot Springs Audiences
M axwell Blade is many things — an illusionist, a musician, an Elton John enthusiast, a collector of oddities. In all of these things, he is an entertainer and still more besides. Based in Hot Springs’ Historic Malco Theatre, which he himself owns and renovated, Blade has mystified and amazed audiences for decades through misdirection, sleight of hand and good old-fashioned showmanship.
A native of Fort Smith, Blade’s love for the art of illusion began around age 12 while watching Mark Wilson, the first major television magician. Blade remembers the multiplying billiard ball trick as the first trick he ever saw, and he still performs his own version.
“When I saw that, I thought, man, I have to learn how to do this stuff,” Blade said. “I was just very intrigued by the world of magic and the art of it all. So I began to learn, and I performed magic all through my young adult life, but I really pursued the music business first. As soon as I graduated, I hit the road. I played [keyboard and vocals] for nine years in the ’80s in a band called Shark Avenue.”
The transformation of the Historic Malco Theatre has been one of Blade’s greatest tricks to date.
When the members of Shark Avenue decided to go their separate ways, Blade went full steam ahead into the magic business. He put together his first magic show in 1993 and made his debut in 1994 at the King Opera House in Van Buren. It was about this time that the name “Maxwell Blade” actually came into the picture.
According to the man himself, Max Blade was the imaginary spy who he would pretend to be while playing make-believe as a child. He took it as a stage name while putting together his first magic show, and his manager from the agency he worked with suggested the current iteration as the ideal name for a magician.
The Maxwell Blade one sees on stage is, in some ways, almost as much of a make-believe character as the original spy from his childhood.
“I think onstage, I become more of a confident character than in everyday life,” Blade said. “I command the audience; this is my stage and you’re here to see me, so let’s go have some fun. I can be one thing off-stage, but people know once I get on that stage, I’m a little bit different. You have to captivate an audience. You have to own the room, but I’m by no means arrogant, which is sometimes the consensus when people have never met me.
“I’m blessed to be able to do this, and I’ve been very fortunate in this deal, but I think anyone who’s a stage performer changes once they’re on stage and the lights and the sounds come on. It’s just a different feeling. You become this bold, confident character, this ‘super-you,’ and of course, the longer you’re in this business, the more confidence you get because doing the tricks is sort of second nature for me by now.”
Seating 290, the main auditorium hosts audiences year-round and on all holidays.
Blade described his first show as a goodbye to his mother, who was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. The show sold out through the weekend, and his mother died a week later. Following that bittersweet success, the show traveled across the southwest, performing in clubs, restaurants and small theaters.
“I don’t do anything small,” Blade said. “I never really have done things on a small scale. So as the show progressed, it became larger until we decided to start looking for a place to put a permanent show. We visited a few cities, and my wife at the time, her parents lived in Hot Springs. So we hung out for a few days and actually watched a film here in the Malco Theatre. I think it was part of the Documentary Film Festival. I thought, we’re going to have this theater right here — this is the one.
“How we made that happen is sort of a miracle in itself. We didn’t have a ton of money, but we sold our home and moved here. I had about $10,000, and we struck a deal with the film-festival folks and the owner of the building in 1996.”
Blade is one of the few magicians in the world who owns his own theater.
Blade performed at the Historic Malco Theatre for 12 years before he was forced to leave the building in 2008 and downsize, building a smaller theater further down Central Avenue. In hindsight, he said, this may have been a blessing in disguise.
Not only would maintaining the revenue needed for the theater have been unrealistic given the economic crisis, but a smaller, more intimate theater forced him to abandon some of the things Blade had previously relied on, such as live animals, large set pieces and assistants, to instead do a one-man show. In their place, he had to further develop his character and lean into comedy, which has remained an essential part of his act.
Blade performed at the smaller theater for 10 years before he was able to return to the Malco in 2018 and give it a significant renovation, making him one of just a handful of magicians in the world who owns his own theater.
The Malco itself deserves some background, being no less storied or interesting than the man who now owns it. Built on the foundation of the Princess Theatre, which was destroyed by a fire in 1935, the art-deco building is on the National Register of Historic Places. It was frequented by future President Bill Clinton during his youth, and during the Cold War, the building’s 14-inch-thick concrete walls and thick steel-beam construction led to the theater being declared a bomb shelter in case of nuclear attack.
Perhaps the structure’s most notable historic feature is that it has one of only two preserved black-only theater entrances in North America, left as a reminder and proof of the state’s segregated past.
Being not only a magician and a musician, but also having a background in construction, Blade handled much of the Malco’s renovations himself.
“The restoration took 14 months, which is four months longer than what I anticipated,” Blade said. “We actually started the construction without a full set of plans. We had enough planning where we knew what we needed, but a lot of decisions were made spur-of-the-moment on the spot. It was a big undertaking, and we received a couple of awards around the state for what we’ve done. This will be here long, long after I’m gone, and I’m proud to have my name attached to it in some way.”
The main theater area of the Malco seats 290, while a smaller parlor theater seats 50. The building also includes a lounge and bar area, and Blade’s personal collection of oddities. Some of his favorite items on display are mutated animals such as a two-snouted calf, which has two mouths, two noses and three eyes, and a two-headed pig with five legs. The upper floors of the Malco, which were once home to a bordello hotel and a radio station, remain unused and have become a popular destination for ghost hunters.
During peak times in the summer, Blade performs shows four to six nights a week. Though he cuts back to weekends-only during the fall, the constant stream of tourists to Hot Springs makes it worthwhile to keep the show running year-round, and he performs on every holiday.
“There’s always something going on in Hot Springs, be it festivals or whatever else. There’s plenty of things to do that attract people, so we just go with the flow,” he said. “The theater’s not always full, I can tell you that. It’s not always 300 people. There’s many nights I may have 60 to 100 people, but it’s always fun. Sometimes they can be more lively than a sold-out crowd.”
The show itself is many different things, and music, comedy and audience participation are just as important to the experience as sleight of hand and misdirection. Blade’s fingers can play a piano just as well as they can draw a card from thin air, and audience members can expect to hear him perform songs by his greatest idol, Elton John.
“People claim I’m obsessed with Elton John. Maybe I am a little bit,” Blade said. “I’ve loved him since I was about 10, when I first heard ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ on the radio. I’ve made it on stage with him three times just by being in the right place at the right time. He’s a musical genius. When you hear a song from Elton John, you can go back in time and remember that era. He’s a good human being and a great songwriter.”
All that being said, magic and illusion are the stars of the show, and Blade has plenty of tricks up his proverbial (and literal) sleeves. With decades of experience in on-stage magic, a viewer can do their very best to see through the misdirection and still have no clue how the deed is done. At times, one might even think they’ve figured it out, only to have the next stage of the trick prove them wrong.
“I just love the art of magic,” Blade said. “I like what it does to your brain. It doesn’t matter if you’re 5 or 90, people of all ages come to enjoy the show, and I just love to perform it. I’ve never had a moment on stage where I wanted to be somewhere else. It’s never boring for me. There’s no barrier of language either; I’ve done shows in other countries where I don’t speak the language.
“It’s a very unique way of entertaining people. People know it’s not real, but I make it look real. That’s why they come to see me. There’s a cognitive disconnect in your brain when you see a trick. Some part of your mind says, ‘No way. This can’t be happening,’ because we’re conditioned to believe that if I put something here, it’s going to be there. When it’s not there, that brings the impossible into being possible.”
Blade is one of the few magicians in the world who owns his own theater.
The world of magic has changed a great deal since Blade learned his first tricks. Where major productions, television and Las Vegas shows by figures like David Copperfield were once the name of the game in magic, street magicians and the internet changed everything. Everyone has heard the old maxim that a good magician never reveals his secrets, but that is exactly what many of these new magicians did. Many thought it would be detrimental to the art, yet that has not been the case.
“With the use of the internet, we can promote. We can get ideas. It’s brought people back into the theaters, and I think magic is meant to be seen live,” Blade said.
Though “Maxwell Blade” is the name on the marquee, he is eager to share the credit and give others their moment in the spotlight, ending his shows with a shout out to the cast and crew who make it all possible. The show has become something of a family business: his oldest daughter, Courtney, is vice president of the corporation and handles ticket sales, payroll and other essential operations. His middle daughter, Lexi, deals with inventory and auditing, and his youngest daughter, Gabby, does photography, printing and photos.
Blade also frequently welcomes guest performers, either as part of the main show or to perform on their own. One repeated guest is ROKAS, a Lithuanian magician that Blade brought to America at the age of 16. Now a professional magician in his own right, ROKAS holds multiple Guinness World Records for card throwing, has performed in numerous countries and is even the host of Lithuanian television singing competition, I Can See Your Voice.
“I’m very blessed and fortunate to be in this business and have people come year after year,” Blade said. “We appreciate every customer that ever comes to that door more than they probably know. I hope to keep doing this for a long, long time. We’re here, we’re happy, and we invite people to come over and bring their family. I promise you, you’ll have a good time. ”
As it rises to the surface, it brings with it a variety of minerals, such as sulfur, calcium, and magnesium. These minerals are believed to have various health benefits, including soothing muscle aches, improving circulation, and promoting relaxation. The hot springs offer several pools of different temperatures, allowing visitors to find their preferred level of warmth.
The pools are surrounded by stunning natural landscapes, including towering mountains, pristine forests, and picturesque meadows. This serene environment adds to the overall experience of tranquility and rejuvenation. While visiting Magician Hot Springs, it is essential to respect the natural surroundings and follow any rules or guidelines set by the local authorities. This helps to preserve the purity and integrity of the hot springs for future generations to enjoy. It is also advised to bring appropriate clothing and essentials for a comfortable stay, as the area can have fluctuating weather conditions. Overall, Magician Hot Springs is a hidden gem that offers a unique and enchanting experience. Whether one seeks physical healing, spiritual renewal, or simply a peaceful retreat, this geothermal wonder provides a perfect escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life..
Reviews for "Exploring the Enchanted Waters: A Guide to Magician Hot Springs"
1. Sarah - 1 star - The Magician hot springs were a total disappointment. The water was barely warm, and the facilities were run-down and dirty. Not to mention, the staff was incredibly rude and unhelpful. I felt like I wasted my money and time coming here. Save yourself the trouble and go elsewhere for a better hot springs experience.
2. Mike - 2 stars - I've visited many hot springs in my life, and I have to say that Magician hot springs do not live up to their hype. The water temperature was inconsistent, going from scalding hot to lukewarm within minutes. The cleanliness of the place was subpar, with algae and mildew present in some of the pools. Additionally, the lack of proper maintenance was evident as there were broken tiles and rusty fixtures. The high entrance fee was definitely not worth what I experienced.
3. Lily - 1 star - I had high expectations for Magician hot springs, but unfortunately, it fell short in every aspect. The water was murky and had an unpleasant smell. The changing rooms were cramped and dirty, and there were no locker facilities available to secure our belongings. The whole place felt neglected, and I couldn't help but feel disappointed by the lack of effort put into maintaining this supposed tourist attraction. I would advise anyone to skip Magician hot springs and look for a better alternative.