No Angel?
As Criss Angel brings an updated Mindfreak to a new venue, a few thoughts on the Strip’s most divisive entertainer
One rocks the orange skin and blond comb-over. The other leans toward streaky goth eyeliner, gold chains, and bare chest. But when it comes to divisiveness, Criss Angel is the Donald Trump of Las Vegas entertainment: Love him or hate him, there is no in-between.
Is it the abs?
Haters: Buy a shirt with sleeves, dude. Or a vest with buttons.
Lovers: His new show opens at Planet Hollywood on December 19 — Angel’s 51st birthday. Maybe 50 is when those sporting six-packs should begin showing them off, not quit.
Maybe it’s the nu-metal.
Haters: Nothing says, “Age gracefully and expand your audience” like a blistering dose of Korn or Godsmack (Korn’s Johnathan Davis has said he is making musical and visual contributions to Angel’s new show).
Lovers: Do Metallica apologize for their age? Let him play his greatest hits.
Longevity should build respect and admiration. But even though scads of shows came and went during Angel’s 10 years at Luxor, they were bumpy years. There was the breakup with Holly Madison, the sweetest heart ever to call the Playboy Mansion home (she termed him “explosive,” “cripplingly insecure,” and even “unintelligent” in a memoir). And the threatening confrontation with Review-Journal columnist Norm Clarke after protesting Angel’s treatment of a different girlfriend at Trump’s Miss USA pageant. (Angel’s not overly fond of me, either, for what it’s worth.)
And, of course, there’s the show itself. Cirque du Soleil could do no wrong until it teamed with Angel for Believe, in which the middle ground between the two brands turned out to be dancing bunnies in bondage gear. Within a year of its Halloween 2008 debut, Angel had stripped away most of the Cirque content to put on a more predictable showcase, amid constant talk that the star magician couldn’t even get along with the nicest Canadian hippies ever to rule Las Vegas entertainment.
And his in-fighting with other magicians? It’s been a while — maybe since the boozy Rat Pack era — since one entertainer has provoked another to declare: “A lot of people want to see you get your ass beat. I’m one of ’em.”
That was Brett Daniels, a fellow magician who posted a 2016 video challenging Angel to a mixed-martial-arts cage brawl — for charity, of course — claiming Angel had ripped off a signature illusion.
Daniels now calls the challenge a piece of “WWE-style performance art.” One that “hit him back hard, on his own level,” because it could have been ripped from Angel’s own playbook. Consider the very WWE-like end of the video promo for last summer’s road show Raw, when Angel leans into the camera with a painted face and guttural growl: “Are you ready? Because I’m comin’ to your town! Rahr-rahr-rahr!”
The magic community is insular, and — perhaps not surprising for a craft rooted in childhood fascinations — rife with locker-room jealousy. Angel and David Copperfield cannot be in the same room together, and their long-running feud carries over to Angel’s new Planet Hollywood venture, Mindfreak. Copperfield moved to block a European illusion builder from selling Angel a fighter-jet prop that would materialize very much like the UFO does in Copperfield’s show at MGM Grand.
But this is tradecraft. What is it about Angel’s larger persona that prompted him to ask those “who might still hate me” to reassess him when he rebooted his Luxor show two years ago? And this around the time he poured his energy into raising money to fight childhood cancer?
After his 2-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia, Angel threw a benefit concert at Luxor. In its tax return for that year, 2016, the Johnny Christopher Children’s Charitable Foundation reported that $720,000 was paid out to charity, $500,000 of it to the St. Baldrick’s Foundation.
But even that nice charitable push comes with an aesthetic tug-of-war. As part of his continued fundraising, Angel built a cancer-awareness segment into his Luxor show. Admirable, right? But the illusion involved a wheelchair occupied by a cancer patient in bald shower cap — whom we had previously seen as a hot showgirl. Hard not to snicker, even without the extra knowledge that the showgirl, Chloe Crawford, left another Las Vegas magician, Murray Sawchuck, for a relationship with Angel.
“I have respect for his brand, how hard he works,” Sawchuck says, echoing a common refrain among detractors. “But a little bit of being humble would go a long way with him.”
Maybe the divisiveness stems from never knowing which Criss Angel you’re going to get. Unlike, say, Penn & Teller’s remarkably consistent personas, “He has three separate characters,” says Angel’s friend, the Amazing Johnathan (Szeles). “He’s got the comedy human side, the Criss Angel Mindfreak guy, and then he’s got that goth character. He does all three of them, and it works.”
Szeles sold Angel some of his old routines and “sat through his show a dozen times with a notebook, writing him stuff and coming up with ideas” to help him lighten up.
But while the new show will have immersive video walls, new pyrotechnics, and, his PR says, some 20 new illusions among the 75 overall, it may dial way back on the comedy, and isn’t carrying over Johnathan’s former sidekick Penny Wiggins or comic foil Mateo Amieva.
Whatever Angel unveils, Brett Daniels knows the final product will reflect a Donald Trump comparison beyond their divisive appeal: “The undeniable, 100 percent belief that what you’re doing is the right thing, and there’s no other way.
“And I think it serves him pretty well, to a point,” Daniels adds. “It’s what gets him there, because he never doubts himself. That’s a big parallel with what you see with Trump, this thing where you think that you can do no wrong.”
Criss Angel Mindfreak, 7p Wed-Sun (plus 9:30p Sat), Planet Hollywood, $69-$139, caesars.com/planet-hollywood