Sleeves up, pants down: “The Naked Magic Show” promises full frontal illusions at the Straz Center

We’ve all seen a good magic trick where the magician shows you there is nothing up their sleeves, but one magic act is taking it a step further to show they aren’t hiding anything.

Australia’s smokin’ hot magicians, Christopher Wayne and Mike Tyler, have been selling out shows from Australia to New Zealand to Hong Kong wearing nothing but abs, a smile and a top hat, now they are coming to America with “The Naked Magic Show” at the Straz Center in Tampa Oct. 16.

This is an R-rated comedy, magic show for 18+, so be sure to get a babysitter!

Tyler spoke to Watermark about the upcoming show which is saving them tons of money by having such a low costume budget.

You both were working successfully as magicians separately in Australia before joining skills. How did you two come together?
I was performing magic at the time, with my clothes on, and Chris was out having a drink and he came over and asked to see some magic. I recognized his face, at the time he had his own TV series performing magic, so I came over to his table and did some of my best trickery, and ended up pinching his watch as well, trying to impress this guy. So after that we just became really good mates and we were the best of mates for about a year or two before we started designing the show together.

How did the idea to perform naked come up?
The original concept was an idea from Simon Painter, who is the guy who created “The Illusionists,” which is the biggest magic show in the world and has been on Broadway and America’s Got Talent. Chris was a part of the team on “The Illusionists” at the time and Simon said to him, “the next idea for the show is going to be a naughty magic show. It’s something that’s never been done before and it’s going to be called ‘The Naked Magician’,” and Chris said to me let’s do it as a duo act and and make it the world’s funniest, naughtiest and cheekiest magic show ever. Simon said it was a great idea for us to do, so we sat down and designed the show based on magic he was performing in his show and some of my show and we really sexified it.

How long have you and Chris been doing the show?
Our first show together, doing it naked, was on Valentine’s Day of 2014, so we’ve been doing it for about 18 months now.

Can we expect to see full frontal?
[Laughs] We do promise three things for this show; it will be one of the most amazing magic shows you’ll ever see, we promise it will be nonstop laughs and we do promise that you will see EVERYTHING in the show but we want to make the audience work for it. It’s like a Tinder date or a Grindr date.

Like any job, there are some work hazards with doing a magic show naked. Have there been any accidents?
We have a saying in the show, good magicians don’t need sleeves and great magicians don’t need pants, so there is definitely a chance for some injuries when you work without pants. There was one time we were doing a photo shoot and there we were assuming the position, both naked and top hats covering our magical bits and pieces. I was throwing a flame ball in the air and it didn’t completely go out in time and floated down and landed right on Chris’ penis and the photographer was like ‘oh that was a great shot let’s try it once more.’ So we did it again and the second time it burned his cock as well. Chris’ job and hobby went up in flames that day.

Was he ok?
There are no scars or anything, he is ok. There were a few days where his sex life wasn’t so fun.

So even though you both are naked, you haven’t tamed the show down. We can expect to see fire?
We wanted to make sure when doing the show, while adding the nudity; we didn’t want to compromise the strength of the magic or the laughs. We have both been comedy magicians for several years and we didn’t want the nudity to be at the expense of the other two aspects. We feel like we have made the perfect dessert with those three ingredients – the comedy, magic and nudity.

Who is the show designed for?
It’s a show for everyone whether you’re male/female, gay/straight, young/old; as long as you’ve got a bit of naughtiness inside. We like to take that, shake it up and open it all over the crowd.

“The Naked Magic Show” will be in Ferguson Hall at the Straz Center in Tampa for one night only, Oct. 16 at 7:00 p.m. Visit StrazCenter.org for tickets and information.

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