Penn & Teller's Broadway "Adventure"

"Once you've got a theater with your name on it," begins the internationally renowned illusionist Penn Jillette, "it's really hard to have to convince people to leave it empty for seven weeks during prime time." But that's just what Jillette and his business/performance partner of 40 years, the mononymous Teller, are doing this summer. They're bidding a six-week farewell to the Penn & Teller Theater at the Rio in Las Vegas to return to the location that started it all, a place where the marquee lights are just as bright as they are in Sin City: Broadway.

According to Jillette, the taller, more loquacious half of the pair, this Broadway stint, their third, is 15 years in the making. How did 15 years of trying eventually end up working out to a July 7-August 16 run at the Marquis Theatre? "That's a fifteen-year answer," Jillette says with a laugh. "It took fifteen years to do it; it'll take fifteen years to explain it." Teller, who is silent onstage, puts it a bit more succinctly: "This turned out to be the right time."

New York Origins

Penn & Teller had been partners for a decade before, as Teller puts it, "We were dragged kicking and screaming" to an off-Broadway run in New York. Producer Richard Frankel (who is also one of the producers of the new engagement) "came to us and signed us to an option agreement. We had a minorly successful little run in Los Angeles and we [didn't] want to risk it. But he was right."

Jillette continues, "We were carnie trash doing fairs and festivals, and our show here and there, and we came out to New York with no optimism whatsoever. We expected to do four weeks here and go back to our regular lives. We didn't even give up the places we were living in Southern California. And then New York changed everything."

That was 1985. For their debut production, Penn & Teller won an Obie Award, honoring "whatever it is that they do" (that's the exact wording for how the Obie committee described their uniquely idiosyncratic blend of comedy and magic). Two years later, they made their Broadway debuts in a self-titled production that ran 122 performances at the Ritz Theatre (now the Walter Kerr). A Broadway return in 1991 with The Refrigerator Tour ran 103 performances at the Eugene O'Neill, then moved off-Broadway for six months. Their careers skyrocketed from there.

International Fame and Longevity

Jillette describes the past four decades as "a blink of an eye and eternity at the same time." Teller believes their success lies precisely in the fact that they're different people. "A partner who in some ways does not share your point of view, and in other ways does, is a big, important part of it." According to Jillette, their relationship consists of "respect, but not affection. We're business partners, but we're not in love."

Yet even as they've become known the world over for their trickery, winning seven Las Vegas Magician of the Year Awards and receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Jillette and Teller are nonplussed by their achievements. "Our business plan did not include this level of success," Jillette says bluntly. "We were happy to play for about two hundred people a night, do fairs, trade shows, [and] cruises."

Forty years after they started performing together, the pair is still at it because they love it, whether playing a space built for 100 or 1700. "The difference," as Teller puts it, "in your ability to actually perceive that is almost nil. If I'm in a room full of one hundred people who love what we're doing, I'm thrilled." "If you now made an offer to me," Jillette continues, "and said you can have the precise level of fame and respect, and make the same amount of money, but you won't get to do the show, I have no interest in that. However, if you said you could do the show but have less fame and less money, I'd take that in a second."

Back to Broadway

As the venues have increased in size, Jillette and Teller have been trying to figure out how to keep their show's level of intimacy the same within bigger spaces. The new Broadway run is perhaps the biggest test of all. "When we were talking about this," Teller remembers, "I said to myself, would this be an adventure? Yeah. It would be an adventure to take our show back to Broadway after all this time. It's a nice jolt to go to a different kind of venue and figure it out."

And while Jillette admits to never having had Broadway dreams as a kid, he knows Broadway is a bigger kahuna than they'll ever encounter in Vegas. "The stakes are much higher on Broadway, and that's fun," he says. "It's fun to rise to that occasion. We will be in the Penn & Teller Theater in Vegas until we die. It's good to have this little bump in the middle."