Anyone who’s seen Jeff McBride’s 1985 mask act will swear it’s a sight of pure sorcery. The master magician engages in a kabuki-inspired spectacle, blurring traditional Japanese dance, martial arts and mime as he materializes masks and his entire wardrobe changes out of thin air.
His sleight of hand too fast to detect by the human eye, McBride cinematically achieves the impossible—and that’s just within the first few minutes. Before he’s done, he’ll have ribbon-danced in fresh face paint, performed his world-famous linking rings routine and re-established himself as one of the most influential magicians to ever declare “Abracadabra.”
Some 40 years later, McBride still brings that level of commitment to everything he does, even if he probably doesn’t have to anymore. He’s opened for Diana Ross at the Circus Maximus Showroom at Caesars Palace. He’s fooled Penn & Teller on their own TV show. He’s headlined at the Las Vegas Hilton and established his own magic school. Yet when it comes to Wonderground, a monthly magic show and meeting of magicians that’s been running for the past 15 years, he still puts his best tricks forward.
McBride founded the show as a “kind of Magic Castle meets Burning Man,” recently passing the reins on to his magical apprentice, Will Bradshaw, who remains in awe of his mentor.
“Every month, for 15 years, Jeff has brought a new piece of magic every time. That’s like a composer writing a new piece of music every month,” says Bradshaw, a magician of 20 years. “There’s something really inspiring about that where you go forward and say, well, if Jeff can do a new one every month, I can do a new one every three months.”
At Wonderground, Bradshaw and McBride have conjured a sense of camaraderie in Las Vegas, arguably the world capital of magic. Illusionists and entertainers from around the world plan trips around it, eager to incite a little wonder of their own at this intimate variety show.
One recent Thursday night at Wonderground at Area15 draws a swell of conversation as Strip headliner Xavier Mortimer pops in. The French “Dream Maker” is ever-charming as he makes the rounds, even before he steps onstage to delight with a mind-bending phone trick. Bobby Berosini Jr., a magician whose father headlined Lido de Paris at the Stardust in the ’80s, applauds from the audience, joined by scores of other magicians who’ve set aside their evenings for the three-hour extravaganza that is Wonderground.
Jeff McBride (left) and Will Bradshaw.
“In order for a young magician, male or female, or variety act, to perform in Vegas, you have to four-wall a room. So we created this oasis of a community that people can step into and be witnessed, showing what they’ve worked on all their lives,” McBride says. “Magicians always are hungry to feed their imaginations with new, exciting magic that is groundbreaking, and those are the people we book. And people come from all over the world to work on our stage.”
Douglas “Lefty” Leferovich, a veteran magician, comedian and producer who leads the adults-only Late Night Magic at the Orleans, creates a similar space for magicians to do what they enjoy doing most. Leferovich has been in Vegas since 2002, back when casinos were still paying for the production of shows.
Nowadays, entertainers have to enter those four-wall agreements, meaning they rent the space and must take responsibility for the costs of the show. That puts a tremendous financial strain on the performers. But breaking into stage magic on the Strip is tough business.
“There’s not a lot of variety spots,” Leferovich says. “If you can’t get into an Absinthe or a Spiegelworld show, or you don’t fit the mold of being in a Cirque [du Soleil] show, there’s not a lot of places for a variety act.
“There [are] performers who don’t have the notoriety of winning America’s Got Talent, or they don’t have connections to bring on an investor and a producer. So there’s talented people who don’t have the resources. Their talent is what they do. With Late Night Magic, it’s great that I can showcase a variety of performers doing their best material.”
Leferovich’s collaborations with the community run the gamut. The New Yorker has been a creative consultant for Jen Kramer’s show at Westgate and he starred as the longtime guest act of Murray Sawchuck at the Tropicana.
“Another great thing that Jeff did with his Wonderground show, because it was geared more toward locals, is he would give people an opportunity to try something new,” Leferovich says. “I could have someone try something new in the middle of the show, but because it’s a ticketed show and we’re going after tourists, obviously I want the show to be as good as possible. Jeff really opened up the door to, ‘You’re gonna go to Europe and do a TV show. You’re working on something new. You really want to do it in front of an audience. Why don’t you come and do it [at Wonderground]?’”
Since he arrived in Las Vegas in the 1980s, McBride has tried to cultivate that sense of inclusion and connection.
“I was part of a performance art community in New York City in my teens and early 20s, and there was this guy named Tom Murrin, the Alien Comic. He would do a new show every month,” McBride recalls. “Some of it was brilliant. Some of it wasn’t. But I would go to see his shows and say, ‘Man, this guy is creative. How does he do it?’ He didn’t do it alone. He had the community around him.”
In an industry where secrets are as good as currency, Las Vegas’ best magicians rarely keep their love for their community confidential. From the time he was six years old, when two twin sisters showed him his first card trick, McBride has been a student. And after over 30 years of apprenticing under the late close-up magician and mentalist Eugene Burger, he’s now the teacher.
In 1991, he established the McBride Magic & Mystery School to help train the next generation and preserve the practice so many performers hold dear.
Sinking into a rustic wooden chair draped in fur in the school’s living room, McBride casually mentions some of the magicians who’ve sat in these very seats, including Lance Burton, Criss Angel, Shin Lim and his beloved student Mat Franco. Over the years, McBride has kept many mementos from the America’s Got Talent champion and longtime headliner at the Linq, who says McBride had a profound effect on him.
“Jeff is the reason I’m in show business in the first place,” says Franco, who has starred in Magic Reinvented Nightly for a decade on the Strip. “I saw him on TV in 1995 performing his world-famous mask act and his card manipulation act, and it quite literally changed my life forever.”
John Shaw, Hollie England, Douglas “Lefty” Leferovich, The Shocker and Bizzaro from Late Night Magic
Before he was even a teenager, Franco, a self-taught magician from Rhode Island, traveled to Las Vegas to take one of McBride’s master classes.
“Just imagine what my teachers thought the first week of September when I’m skipping school to go to Las Vegas for a week,” Franco laughs. “But I was very serious about it, even at the age of 12.”
“You grow up idolizing a certain singer or comedian, and now all of a sudden, you’re able to spend three days learning from them. It was very inspiring,” he continues. “From the very beginning, all the way up until I took the plunge to do magic full-time as an adult years ago, Jeff was always, always really encouraging.”
Bradshaw, now master of ceremonies at Wonderground, can attest to McBride’s impact and dedication to sharing the art. At 17, he started practicing magic, observing McBride’s VHS teaching tapes. In 2004, at a Harry Houdini convention in Appleton, Wisconsin, the duo officially met.
“My mom told me, ‘You should go up and talk to him,’ but it was unthinkable for a 17-year-old to do that,” Bradshaw says. “So I’m having this conversation with my mom, and Abby, Jeff’s wife, notices and whispers into Jeff’s ear. He comes over and says, ‘Hello, my name is Jeff McBride. I was a little too nervous to come over, but my wife convinced me. Can I do some magic for you?’”
Bradshaw had originally committed to studying psychology, but this encounter shifted everything. He performed his first magic act at a burlesque show, where he lied about his age to get in. Set on becoming McBride’s apprentice, Bradshaw spent years perfecting his craft, even as McBride kept telling him no.
“He told me this story of the young initiates going up to the Shaolin temples, and they would be thrown out three times before they would be admitted. So, you’re not ready, but don’t give up,” Bradshaw explains.
Eager to enroll in McBride’s master class in Vegas, the young magician took a gamble of his own.
“I came down to Vegas with $7.50 in my pocket, and I went down to Fremont Street, and I made a goal that within one month, I would earn enough money only doing magic to pay for the tuition for the class,” Bradshaw says.
He worked eight-hour days, six days a week, saving every last penny from his Fremont gig.
“Two days before the class, I show up, I knock on Jeff’s door, and I have a little duffel bag with me, and I walk right in here,” he continues, gesturing around the living room. “I sit right where you are, and I open up the duffel bag and it is filled with one dollar bills.”
“Enough to pay his tuition,” adds McBride. “It was like a trial by fire down on Fremont Street. He was working there day after day after day. That’s going to get you good.”
As McBride’s apprentice, Bradshaw has traveled the world with his world-famous mentor. He’s performed at the historic Magic Castle in Los Angeles and opened for McBride in China. But there comes a time when the student must surpass the teacher.
After the pandemic, when many magic shows began to open again, the question of what would happen with Wonderground came to a head.
“[Will] said, ‘Let’s keep Jeff McBride’s Wonderground going.’ And I said, no, if we’re going to do it, it’s going to be an example of passing on lineage, passing on the wand to future generations,” McBride says.
When the show returned to its new location at Area15 in 2024, it did so under a new name: Will Bradshaw’s Wonderground.
That switch behind them, McBride and Bradshaw are now eager to share something else: a particular bookshelf in the Magic & Mystery School. It’s nondescript, if not a little forgettable at first glance. But then McBride deals out instructions.
“You take your index finger and point it right there and say, ‘Abracadabra,’” McBride commands.
I repeat the word, and suddenly the shelving of books pushes inward, revealing a secret room hidden behind it.
“Welcome to the mystery school,” McBride says. “This is where the history of magic lives.”
And it’s not an exaggeration. Hundreds of old, dusty books line the shelves. The spines appear worn, pages brittle, but the content of their history remains concrete and unchanging. There’s books about seasonal sorcery, alchemy and parlor tricks. Others demand a little more care, like the 1558 copy of Giambattista della Porta’s Natural Magick, one of the oldest magic books in the world, which sits on a podium.
Mat Franco
“The best place to hide a secret is in a book,” Bradshaw says. “And so you can find old books on magic where you can rediscover secrets which are no longer being performed. Because every 10 years or so, magic continues to go through waves of what is popular and what is not. If you go back 30 or 40 years, you can start being ahead for the next wave.”
Las Vegas’ magical history has a similar narrative. Oakland’s Gloria Dea performed the first magic act on the Strip in 1941 at the El Rancho Vegas, but at that time, magic was still a hard sell.
In the ’60s, revues like Lido De Paris and Folies Bergère became all the rage. “And all of a sudden, the big style of entertainment turned into these staircases and showgirls with feathers, which was very French in its origin. All the casinos went feathers,” McBride says.
Shows wanted more variety acts, which is how many magicians found their inroad.
“Siegfried & Roy, a lot of people don’t know, started as a specialty act in Folies at the Tropicana. …They eventually, over time, grew with material, and then they became their own show. Same with Lance Burton,” Leferovich says. “Lance Burton did an act, I believe for nine years in Folies, and after the first four or five, he started doing half of his dove act. Then he would start incorporating new material. So when the opportunity presented itself, and he moved his show to the Hacienda, which is where Mandalay Bay is now, he had tested all his material.”
For a while, you could be an act but not a headliner, McBride says. It wasn’t until the ’80s and ’90s that Vegas doubled down on magic. Caesars Palace even launched Caesars Magical Empire, an immersive venue with underground catacombs, in 1996.
And Vegas’ magical reputation and community of entertainers has only grown. There are currently more magicians here per capita than anywhere else.
“Magic is like the primary language here,” McBride says.
Over the last few years, Bradshaw has noticed magic getting more intimate again.
“Pre-COVID, everybody loved these big circus shows. Now, post-COVID … magic is coming up in these really fantastic, intimate show settings. Now, people go forward and say, ‘Wait, I could go and be an ant on an anthill, or I could be one of 60 people in a show that is just for us,’ and suddenly you get more connection with the performers,” he says.
That connection, via magic, is a gift. And it’s something McBride hopes to see continue being shared in the city.
“From the earliest times, people gathered around the tribal fire. Thousands of years ago, when the sun would set, people would come to where the light was, to make magic and share stories. And the same thing happens in Las Vegas each night,” McBride says. “When the sun goes down, people come to where the light is. And whether they know it or not, they’re re-enacting this very ancient, timeless ritual of sharing stories. Because where there’s light, there’s magic. And Las Vegas has more light per square inch than anywhere else in the world.”
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