Magic, mystery, and life’s big qestions: Ben Seidman’s ‘Good Charlatan’ comes to Pittsburgh

About 20 years ago, Ben Seidman was bit by a unicorn and has been performing magic ever since.

That’s the “silly answer,” Seidman told the Chronicle when asked how he became a sought-after entertainer, with major television credits and the only person ever named resident magician at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas.

The “real answer,” he said, is that he “got very lucky.”

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“I always loved this stuff when I was young,” Seidman said, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “I did theater growing up, and I met this man who worked in technical theater who had a history of performing magic. He kind of took me under his wing, and without him, I would not have ended up here. He was the one who taught me the basics, explained that all of the real secrets are in books. And then he was the one who said, ‘Hey, you should move out to Las Vegas.’”

Which is what he did.

Seidman was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and attended Milwaukee Jewish Day School. He spent his first three years of college at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire then finished his degree in theater at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

“Then, right out of college, I got hired to work as a consultant for a magic TV show with a magician who was famous at the time,” he said. “And that was my that was my first big jump.”

That led to his gig at Mandalay Bay, and then he was “kind of off to the races,” he said, performing shows around the world.

Seidman, who combines sleight of hand and psychological deception, will bring his show “Good Charlatan” to Liberty Magic downtown from March 5-16.

A full-time magician, Seidman frequently performs at corporate events, fundraisers, private parties and on television. He used to perform on cruise ships.

“I met my wife on a cruise ship I was performing on,” he said. “This is her joke, not mine: She said it’s basically the plot of ‘Dirty Dancing,’ but on a boat, me being Patrick Swayze in this example.”

While performing on television and at corporate events has been Seidman’s bread-and-butter, for the past 17 years, he said, he dreamed of doing a different and very specific show — the one he will be bringing to Pittsburgh.

“You could call it my life’s work,” he said. “It’s the thing that I’ve been thinking about the most over the years.”

It’s not “the razzle dazzle, knock them right out of the park immediately” type of show that he does when Coca Cola or Amazon hires him to entertain at a corporate event, he said, but it’s the show he’s been “thinking about, dreaming about.” He described it as “kind of the intersection between magic and crime, and the pick-pocketing, the phony psychics — these techniques that can be used to deceive people instead of for good.”

Finally, last year, after recognizing he had assumed a position of prominence in his field and had an abundance of corporate gigs, he set aside time to write the show of his dreams.

So far, he’s performed “Good Charlatan” just six times, he said, in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Manchester, New Hampshire, and it’s been “incredible.”

Promotional materials say that “At its core, ‘Good Charlatan’ questions the existence of free will and reimagines how one simple lie can unfold into a spiral of truth.”

Seidman elaborated.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “There are people who use their powers for good and people who do the opposite. And these techniques can go either direction. Look, this is a show about trust above all, and where we put our trust. … We trust people who we feel are being truthful. But what happens when we’re wrong? Like, there are things in our lives that we are so positive we know the right answer to. There are things that you are confident are true. And I’m really fascinated by these things, especially when it turns out that we were wrong all along.”

Seidman credits his Jewish upbringing with instilling in him a drive for education, which in turn led to his commitment to learn the secrets and techniques of his trade.

“I really attribute the Jewish day school that I went to — and just that cultural norm — with allowing me to pursue what is essentially a crazy job to have,” he said. “No one thinks they could actually be a magician and make a good living, let alone one that’s good enough to own property in Los Angeles. I really think that my Jewish education kind of like steered me in the direction where I was willing to do the work and learn everything I possibly could, and poke this from every single angle, which is at its core what I think so much of Judaism is about — not just taking ‘these are the rules and we have to follow them,’ but examining why we do what we do. And, you know, the discussions that come from a Shabbat dinner with friends, where you’re challenging each other, and arguing and sometimes getting heated. It’s like you’re poking at an idea from every possible angle. And that’s what magic requires, that’s the creative problem-solving that goes into creating a magic trick. And so for me, they really are intertwined in this very strange way.”

Ticket information for “Ben Seidman in Good Charlatan” can be found at trustarts.org/production/95912/ben-seidman-in-good-charlatan. PJC

Toby Tabachnick can be reached at ttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.