With the bravado and charisma of a Bond villain and the frame, build and spectacles of Stephen Merchant, magician Ondřej Pšenička (pronounced UN-dray Shin-EETZ-kah) flourishes in equal measures when a trick is working — and when it isn’t. His maniacal grin grows wider after a dramatic reveal has the crowd ooh and aah, but when cards slip from his hands or an important cassette tape unspools during playback, he has quips at the ready, delivered with supreme confidence as if everything is going according to plan.
Pšenička’s “52 Lovers,” running at the Chicago Magic Lounge in its 100-ish person main theater, is a remarkable show of personality from the Czech magician who leans on his ease with the audience, elevating the already impressive tricks and tools he developed himself.
Before the show starts, the “52 Lovers” audience finds itself roped into the madness. A deck of playing cards with timely prompts printed on the back — like asking a question at a particular moment or getting up to hand Pšenička a prop — is distributed. When the lights eventually come up, Pšenička’s plan is set in motion. One by one, 10 recruits follow their orders and perform the first trick entirely on their own.
He has used this tactic before: Appearing on Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us” competition show for the first time, Pšenička had Penn pick a card and recruited host Alyson Hannigan to follow instructions relayed through headphones and complete the trick. Penn and Teller were sufficiently fooled, a feat Pšenička achieved twice more in subsequent visits.
For “52 Lovers,” Pšenička’s tricks break from the static, shuffle-based “Is this your card?” visual reveals that other magicians tend to use. In one trick, he produces a deck and claims to have coated each individual card with its own type of perfume, sniffing out an audience member’s selection like a bloodhound hunting for Kate Spade. He blends humor and extreme physicality when escaping a straitjacket, grooving to David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” as he delicately caresses and undoes the strap tied tight across his groin.
Pšenička’s playfulness compensates for the show’s weaker moments. While the card illusions in “52 Lovers” ooze savvy, his mentalism-style tricks lose a bit of splendor. At one point, he invites four audience volunteers to join him onstage, asking them to choose a tarot card that speaks to them in some way. One by one, the meaning of the selected cards is read from “Tarot for Dummies,” and Pšenička guesses which member picked which card.
Working from a lineup of four though feels like too limited a choice, especially when the number shrinks as he identifies each person’s card. He managed to elevate the trick at a recent performance by jovially picking on one volunteer, “Warren,” who had quite the audience following and refused to betray even the slightest tell as the descriptions were read. Pšenička seemed genuinely excited by this turn of events, even welcoming Warren back with fanfare when the man returned to fulfill his assigned prompt.
The stage in “52 Lovers” is only lightly adorned, containing a table for card tricks, a few sealed decks on pedestals and a framed card, its face obscured. With so little else to focus on, attention turns to the cards themselves — the only element that, for a moment, seems out of place. Pšenička eschews the ubiquitous Bicycle playing cards and their cherubic cyclists for Butterfly playing cards, which he created himself.
Turns out, Butterfly cards boast more than a beautiful back: Even extremely light googling reveals that they are marked. Pšenička, giving countless interviews across the web, makes no secret of the fact that he developed Butterfly cards to enable marvelous card tricks without complicated sleight-of-hand — and they proved to be quite popular. In 2019, he launched a Kickstarter campaign that was fully funded in seven minutes and hit almost eight times the goal within 24 hours.
Some people might throw down their tickets in disgust upon learning of Pšenička’s methods, but that would be a mistake. At no point during “52 Lovers” will you catch Pšenička studying the back of a card or fumbling to position the deck in a particular way. The show is all the more captivating knowing he could always take the easy way out, but doesn’t, and instead crafts illusions that capitalize on all five senses and his natural magnetism. The audience definitely couldn’t care less about a card’s markings when the final illusion reveals Pšenička’s plan in stunning specificity. Bond villains always had a knack for the theatrical.
