David Kwong is a very clever fellow. He sets New York Times crosswords, he’s a Scrabble champion, he does really complicated mental arithmetic at lightning speed, and he performs magic tricks. He is unabashed about the ‘trickery’ aspect; all magic tricks are puzzles that have solutions if you are smart enough to find them. David Kwong is.
So, it turns out, is a sizeable percentage of the audience in Wilton’s Music Hall, for David Kwong invites loads of participation, sets lots of puzzles for the audience to solve, gets really impressive responses from crossword aficionados and Scrabble buffs and other brainy types. Among other things he brings are a very friendly manner and an exceedingly warm and engaging stage presence. He gives TED Talks on magic and illusion, and this performance has many features in common with that medium: informative, engaging, full of cool new facts. And all delivered with charm and humour.
The show is very developmental. A trick that is quite astonishing, that seems to be accomplished, gets another airing half an hour later, revealing new, even more astonishing elements. Probably being able to work out how the tricks are done is a very satisfying evening out, but being astonished is fun too.
Watching, and contributing to, the setting of a New York Times crossword is good fun, and the speed with which he does it is impressive, but when Kwong shows that his crossword links into a whole raft of previous tricks, that’s when the audience gets the comprehensive nature of the cleverness.
This is a highly entertaining, impressively slick, very charming evening in the theatre. David Kwong is funny and disarming, and talks up a storm on a huge variety of interesting (if somewhat nerdy) topics. Code breaking, soft fruit, game theory, how to get top scores in Scrabble, the list goes on and on. And on top of that, he is very, very good at trickery, and evidently very clever indeed.
He wears his talent with abundant self-deprecating charm; he is insistent that all he is doing is trickery and illusion, and he shows his workings a fair amount of time. Sometimes, though, he doesn’t tell the audience how it’s done. And then it’s entirely possible that those tricks aren’t tricks at all, but genuine, real, actual magic. Maybe…
Runs until 29 November 2025
