The 150-seat theater is equipped with projection mapping capabilities, creating digital sets and an immersive audience experience, as video art is exhibited across its walls. “It’s all very alien to me,” James continues, “but I’m in very, very good hands, and the magicians who’ve been teaching me are some of the finest in the world.”īy the time A Brief History of Magic opens, the Midnight Theatre will be ready to fully unleash the tech-y features Adcock believes will separate it from other performance spaces across the city. “When I actually told my mom about the show she was like, ‘Well, you can’t even shuffle a deck of cards,’” says James, a Scorpio who, perhaps joking, perhaps not, responded by informing her mother she would not be invited to the performance. That connective tissue has helped carry James through what she describes as a “crash course” in magic, with “‘crash’ being the operative word,” she says. James says the show follows a girl who grows up around magic, and when she decides to embark on a magician’s career, through “weird and wonderful ways proceeds to learn magic tricks from the world’s greatest magicians.” James was drawn to the role because, like her character, she herself took a leap of faith to chase a dream, leaving her English homeland to act in the U.S., her success not guaranteed. This time her credit will read: A Brief History of Magic. Also debuting at the Midnight Theatre next month is an Adcock-produced one-woman show starring Holly James, alumnus of the Chicago-based production of Hamilton, as well as Broadway musicals American Psycho and Moulin Rouge!. There will most definitely be stand-up comedy, starting in November when the New York Comedy Festival kicks off. “We want to do for a show what Joe’s Pub did for Hamilton,” Adcock says. There could be album release parties and play readings, he says, foreseeing the Midnight Theatre as an “incubator” for performances in various stages of development. He envisions Broadway stars gracing the Midnight Theatre stage, delivering a show revival or developing a variety showcase of music they appreciate most. “We’ve let the world know we’re open-minded.” “It certainly was in the cards from the beginning that we look at this as a cross-genre space,” Adcock says, apparently without noticing his wonderful magic pun. Its bread-and-butter is magic shows, but Midnight Theatre co-founder and creative director Warren Adcock, who boasts a deep résumé in magic as a production manager, says its doors of wood and weathered brass will be open to creatives of all kinds. With an art deco façade that would more organically place it in Tim Burton Batman movies than its current all-glass-all-the-time environs, the Midnight Theatre is a new, tech-forward arts playhouse coupled with fine-dining and -drinking experiences. Tucked away inside a central plaza of commerce at Manhattan West, Brookfield’s mixed-use development adjacent to Hudson Yards, there’s a curious tenant with a throwback sensibility that its proprietors hope proves “magical” to New Yorkers.
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