CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Magic is making a comeback in Chicago, and one of the places driving that resurgence is Andersonville’s Chicago Magic Lounge, which was recently featured on WBBM’s Looped In: Chicago podcast. As part of her research for the episode, WBBM’s Arielle Raveney went to the lounge, where she witnessed the following:
Magician Kevin Kapinos called a woman named Rose up to the stage and pretended to hand her an imaginary deck of cards. Rose pretended to shuffle it and handed it back to Kapinos. For the rest of the trick, the pair stood about 4 feet apart, and Rose kept her hands behind her back. Rose was asked to imagine one card, which she was then asked to fold in her mind. Rose settled on the jack of clubs. She said she folded twice with the face on the inside.
Rose then brought her hands out from behind her back. She found the jack of clubs — folded exactly how she described it — stuck under her watch. The crowd went nuts.
“I was totally shocked,” Rose said. “I kept thinking, you know, ‘Am I feeling something?’ And I did not … They had it folded inside, not outside, and I made the distinction to him. He didn’t lead me into it.”
Magic has a rich history in Chicago, so much so that there’s a recognized “Chicago style” of magic. Cindy Ferkol, who’s been with the Chicago Magic Lounge since 2018, said the style can be traced back to the early 20th century at a restaurant called Schulien’s, which closed in the late ’90s.
That’s where Matt Schulien, whose father owned the restaurant, started going around from table to table and entertained guests with card magic.
“He wasn’t a particularly skilled magician, like really technically skilled, but he had performance out the ying yang,” Ferkol said. “He really created a different style.”
Up to that point, magicians often performed as a more traditional, vaudeville-style show. It would be the type of act where a man dressed in a tuxedo cuts his beautiful assistant in half. Schulien, though, swapped out the fancy top hat for overalls and brought magic directly to someone’s table.
Ben Barnes, a longtime magician who works as the entertainment director for the Chicago Magic Lounge, said he remembered the night Schulien’s closed. Since the closure of Schulien’s and other magic bars like it, the Chicago Magic Lounge has prided itself on being a place where magicians of all skill sets can come together.
“When people come in here and we start this process, they usually come in with some magic that they know,” Barnes said. “A big rule is, for the first three or four months, that’s all we work on. We’re not getting distracted from what you say you were interested in, and we figure out how to make the most out of that.”
After three to four months of regular, intensive time, he said plenty of people are ready to perform in front of an audience. Now, decades after the closure of places like Schulien’s, Barnes said magic is back “with a vengeance.”
“Magic will always be, because people won’t let it die,” he said. “They need it, you know? As long as there’s people, there’ll be magic.”
To hear the full episode about Chicago’s magic scene, be sure to find Looped In: Chicago on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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