It's Saturday night in Niagara Falls. SUVs and minibuses inch their way up Clifton Hill, past the Marvel Superhero Adventure City, past Dracula's Haunted Castle and Guinness World Records Museum, past the Movieland Wax Museum of the Stars and the House of Frankenstein. The sidewalks are crammed with weary parents, overstimulated kids and casino-bound tourists loaded with cheap souvenirs and cash.
Just off the main drag, a trickle of cars ne-gotiates the turn at a low-slung yellow building with a three-storey-high billboard that shouts, "Las Vegas Has Arrived."
Above this bold claim appears the face of Greg Frewin, posed next to a white Siberian tiger. While Frewin's name has none of the cachet of David Copperfield or Siegfried and Roy, to magic buffs, he is the International Grand Champion-the most highly decorated magician in the world and the star of one of Niagara Falls's newest tourist attractions. He has worked some of the biggest rooms on the Vegas strip: the Flamingo, Caesars Palace, the Tropicana. He's made a cruise ship disappear on live TV and, in an illusion called the Drop of Doom, he has escaped from a wooden crate dangling from a helicopter over the Mediterranean.
In May, 2005, Frewin staged what may be his most daring trick yet: He opened an eponymous 700-seat dinner theatre in this tourist mecca. Nearly every night of the week, Frewin-along with two tigers, one cougar, five showgirls, a dog and various birds-perform a Vegas-style magic show, complete with 12 illusions and three dance numbers.
At 8 p.m., the lights dim and music pours from the speakers. Then a voice booms out: "Ladies and gentlemen..." An elevator descends slowly onto the stage, and the master magician himself materializes out of thin air, wearing black jeans and a slightly oversized jacket.
Frewin leads off the 90-minute show with his signature routine, whisking birds from hand-kerchiefs and flinging them from slingshots. He drops an egg on the floor, stomps on it and scoops up...a dove, of course. Brandishing a machete in one hand, he throws another dove into the air and, voila, "slices" it into two birds. With seven birds now cooing happily, Frewin drapes a purple cape overtop their cage and swooshes it away. The cage is gone, and in its place stands a young woman in a black-and-silver bird costume. "Woo! Right on," someone yells from the audience, as more showgirls dance onto the stage for a samba number.
At the candlelit tables and intimate booths, tourists from Buffalo, Toronto, Illinois, Florida, the Czech Republic, Saudi Arabia and even Niagara Falls watch the show with wide eyes, nudging each other after a particularly, well, magical display-like the one where Frewin levitates a feather-clad assistant a metre and a half in the air, then walks right through her, or where he turns two female dancers into one 300-pound, orange Siberian tiger.
Onstage, Frewin is all flourish and polished patter. That's 90% of magic: distracting the audience so they don't see what's up your sleeve. And if, through the glare of the lights, he can see that more than half the auditorium-which cost Frewin and his backers roughly $3 million to build-is empty on this late-June night, he doesn't let on.
Frewin had arrived at the theatre three hours before showtime. Backstage, his staff was getting ready for this evening's per-formance, rolling out oddly shaped sets equipped with hidden staircases and ramps, and countless props-velvet capes, birdcages, handkerchiefs that multiply out of control. Each day, Frewin cleans and inspects each piece of equipment. "If a silk hankie is ripped, it could change the whole routine," he says. "I don't want to screw up onstage."
Each illusion in Frewin's nightly repertoire was designed and built by the magician, so he can avoid paying copyright fees and dealing with rip-off artists. But his magic tricks aren't all that different from those performed by the old-time magicians whose life-size vintage ads hang on the walls of his theatre: "George, the Supreme Master of Magic," proclaims one such advertisement, while another announces "Carter the Great-Carter condemned to death for witchcraft, cheats the gallows." Beside the in-house bar hangs a poster publicizing Frewin's eight-month run in Kuala Lumpur, where he performed with 22 dancers and five cats. The magician (who refuses to divulge his exact age, but who is, in fact, 39) doesn't look much different now, seven years later-he has the same thick, dark hair and wears the same signature collarless jackets.
Frewin was eight years old when he got a magic kit for Christmas. His first trick was a classic: turning a U.S. $100 bill into a buck (he still does that one in his show today, with help from someone from the audience). By the time he hit high school, he'd run through all the books he could find. "It was tough to get information on magic back then," says Frewin. "You'd have to go to the library and hope someone hadn't taken all the books out forever."
At the time, Doug Basham was the biggest magician on the Toronto scene. When Frewin was 15, he hounded Basham into training him once a week at the magician's home in Hamilton. To start, they focused on basic close-up tricks with coins, cards, ropes and handkerchiefs. During the hour-long bus-ride home, Frewin would practise each move a thousand times. His father, Art, then a supervisor at Stelco, was exasperated with his son's complete disregard for homework. "You know, it's good to have a hobby, but you gotta make a living," Frewin's dad used to say. Now Art works as his son's manager and business partner.
Soon Frewin graduated to more advanced illusions. Basham showed him how to work an empty silk hankie through his hands, then mould out a real dove. "Doug taught me the method using a fake bird," says Frewin. "The first time I made a real bird appear, it was almost magic to me."
Frewin honed his stage skills working as Basham's assistant, and eventually began entering magic competitions around the world. "The competition circuit is kinda like figure skating," he says. "If you win, agents will recognize you, so when you send in a tape, they say, 'Oh, it's that guy.'" In 1993, Frewin and his bird-act won top medals at both the Society of American Magicians and the International Brotherhood of Magicians. A year later, he took gold at the World Championships of Magic. That unprecedented run earned him the title of International Grand Champion of Magic.
With magic's triple crown on his resumé, Frewin started booking shows worldwide-on cruise ships, at casinos and in theatres in Europe, Malaysia, Japan, the Bahamas and Vegas. He also appeared on three episodes of World's Greatest Magic and, in 1998, produced his own one-hour show, Magic at Sea, where he made a Holland America cruise ship disappear.
Along the way, he married a Canadian girl, Alanna, had two kids, and started thinking about moving home. He'd always had a soft spot for Niagara Falls-he did his first stage show at the Lily Langtry, a dinner theatre at the Maple Leaf Village amusement park (which would later shut down and be redeveloped into Casino Niagara). "I started thinking Niagara Falls was a great place to bring a magic show," he says.
Frewin and his father began pitching local investors and city officials, and searching for a location. "This was seven years in the planning," says Frewin. They found the ideal space, a 42,000-square-foot warehouse just off Clifton Hill (the Falls's main strip), in 2003. The landlord, Ashak Merani, who also owns a Day's Inn across the street and is opening a boutique hotel next door at the end of 2006, was impressed by their show. "I thought it would complement what I already had in the area," says Merani. "And it's some-thing we needed in Niagara Falls anyway-people come for the show and they stay an extra night. It helps the entire city."
Frewin signed a 20-year lease on the building (at a monthly cost of more than $40,000), moved his family into a farm outside Niagara Falls, and got to work. Merani financed much of the $3-million renovation, but Frewin and his father are heavily invested in the venture as well, as are a few friends and relatives. "People would ask what they could do to help," says Frewin. "And I'd say, 'Got money?'"
Frewin and his dad did much of the work themselves. Greg designed and built the stage to his own specs (it juts into the cavernous auditorium so he can get closer to the audience), and did all the electrical wiring. "I spent four months in this building, working 16, 18 hours a day," says Frewin. "Why spend the money when we could do it ourselves?"
While Niagara Falls was thrilled to have a glitzy new attraction, the city balked at Frewin's exotic animals. In Las Vegas, home to about 3,500 magicians, exotic animals are common. In Niagara Falls, city officials thought they were an accident waiting to happen. Frewin spent four months filling out paperwork and attending meetings to allay the city's fears. In the end, he was stuck with a list of rules longer than one of his trick hankies.
Because the cats-two-year-old sisters, Cashmere and Shamira-aren't allowed back-stage if any untrained workers are around, they stay locked up in a holding area until the crew clears out, about an hour before showtime. Five-week-old Siberian cubs Misty and Boomer are exempt from the rules-for now. As the stagehands moved Frewin's props into place, the cubs came squawking out of a storage room on fat, wobbly legs for their daily training session, running back and forth across the stage behind Frewin in preparation for their brief appearance in tonight's show.
By December, they'll weigh 150 pounds and eat a small fortune in raw beef and chicken every day. For now, they're content with a bottle of milk each, delicately administered by Frewin and tiger trainer John Ferrara. While they fed "the babies" backstage, a few dozen customers, who paid up to $59 for dinner and a show, arrived for their own meal (the bulk of the audience, though, showed up after dinner). As of late June, Frewin says, the theatre was drawing a crowd of about 250 or 300 customers for each performance. "Last year was our first year, and that's always the toughest," he says lightly. "But we projected more in 2006 than we've been getting."
Even the International Grand Champion of Magic, it seems, can't conjure customers from thin air.
You can't visit Niagara Falls without being bombarded with advertising for the newly formed Cirque Niagara, which started a 4½-month run of its Avaia acrobatic show in June, at the new $1-million-plus Celestial Palace Tent just outside town. On the boardwalk near the Horseshoe Falls, the Cirque sells tickets out of a trailer emblazoned with its logo. Acrobats hit the higher-end hotels in town each morning to drum up customers. On the New York side of the Falls, a giant branded hot-air balloon faces Clifton Hill, beckoning tourists to see Cirque Niagara's show.
Look around for Frewin-related advertising, however, and you won't find any. Other than some ads in the local newspapers (which even Art Frewin admits tourists don't read), only the giant sign that looms over the theatre's parking lot offers a hint of what goes on inside.
Part of what's plaguing the Frewins is their own lack of marketing experience. For the past 13 years, major venues, with their in-house sales and marketing teams, have courted Frewin. All he had to do was show up and work his magic.
Now it's Frewin's own money (not to mention his reputation) on the line.
To help pay the bills and raise the theatre's profile, the Frewins signed a deal with Silver Mist Productions to bring Disney's Aladdin Jr.-a $1.6-million show with a cast of 18 and a full orchestra-to the theatre. The family musical ran up to eight times a week from May to Sep-tember. And Silver Mist will remount the show over the Christmas season; in 2007, it plans to stage Disney's Beauty and the Beast. "We never had a chance to do shows down in Niagara Falls because there was never the stage space," says Silver Mist's co-founder, Linus Hand, who managed Toronto's 1,500-seat Princess of Wales Theatre from its opening in 1993 until 2004, when he left to work closer to home in Niagara Falls. "The Frewin theatre allowed us to seriously look at bringing shows to Niagara Falls."
The Frewins' focus, however, is to sell the Las Vegas Magic Review. Greg is putting together a show for school groups that will combine entertaining the children with magic and educating them about his exotic animals-it's not a sexy market, but it offers steady income. Hand says even huge shows like The Lion King, which ran at the Princess of Wales for four years, counted on school groups, particularly to fill weekday matinées.
Meanwhile, Art is chasing the senior set. Last February, he attended the American Bus Association's Marketplace, a massive convention of tour-bus operators and group travel agents, and he managed to persuade a couple of companies to put the Greg Frewin Dinner Theatre on their Niagara Falls itinerary. He's hoping to do even better at the 2007 conference in Texas.
When Niagara Falls tourism starts to wane in the fall, the Frewins have some ideas on how to lure the Toronto market to their show. Once again, Cirque Niagara is a step ahead-it has had some success drawing city dwellers (and media attention) with a slick, sophisticated website, special deals and corporate discounts.
But no one in Niagara Falls has been immune from this year's sharp drop in tourist traffic. With a strong loonie and gas prices as high as three bucks a gallon, Americans-the mainstay of the city's tourism traffic-are staying home. To compound the problem, many would-be visitors believe they already need a passport to cross the Canadian border, though the new law doesn't affect land travel until 2008. "There hasn't been enough press telling them it's not in effect now," sighs Anna Pierce, the director of Niagara Falls Tourism. "They don't understand how it works, and it's not worth the trouble of finding out."
From January to May, 2006, the number of Americans visiting Niagara Falls dropped about 1.95 million or roughly 4% compared with the same period the year before. "Usually we're about 12 million over the course of a year, but the U.S. market is a lot slower this year," says Pierce. "The European and Asian markets have been doing really well, but those numbers can't even come close to making up for the U.S. losses."
Niagara Falls-and hence Frewin-has a much more fundamental problem, however: Somewhat surprisingly, the city is simply not renowned for its entertainment scene-or any nightlife at all. "Ten years ago, there was no casino. Other than a few attractions that stayed open at night, every-thing was pretty much daylight only," says Pierce. "Yeah, you can see the Falls lit up, but then what?" As a result, the average visit to the Falls lasts just 1.7 days. (In Las Vegas, where the city's glam shows are a key marketing tool, it's 3.5.)
Building the city's entertainment offerings has been the primary goal for Pierce and other local stakeholders for the past several years. "A thriving theatre district drives rooms," says Hand. "The big hotel operators know this." Hotels aren't the only businesses to benefit: While they're in town, show-goers spend money at local restaurants, do a little shopping and visit other attractions in the area.
The Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort-built in 2004 on an old Ontario Hydro site-helped get things going, though it's had trouble luring big-name acts. But it recently poached a couple of key executives from enter-tainment powerhouse Casino Rama, in Orillia, Ontario, to help boost its bookings.
Then along came the Frewin theatre, followed by Cirque Niagara. Pierce is hoping these two major new attractions will help draw more productions to the city (and more overnight stays). "Success breeds success," she says. "Our biggest thing is to go out and make the shows we have as successful as possible. Then other groups will have some statistics to use to push their idea to investors."
Linus Hand knows how important it is to build critical mass for Niagara Falls. The healthiest years for Toronto's tourism industry, he says, came when the city's major venues were all staging big-ticket shows at the same time. In fact, ticket sellers at the Princess of Wales would routinely recommend competing shows just to get tourists to come to town. "We're having meetings with Cirque Niagara to do package deals," says Hand, "and people say, 'But isn't that the competition?' Are you kidding me? I wish there were 10 different shows."
Over the summer, Frewin started visiting some of the city's high-end hotels with Misty and Boomer in tow, and magicians have begun performing tricks in local restaurants. By mid-August, attendance at the theatre was more in line with the Frewins' original projections-between 400 and 500 customers at each performance.
"One more?" Frewin asks the audience, with eyebrows raised, as the show nears its end. People clap and cheer as the magician jogs to the edge of the stage. Frewin conjures white silk handkerchiefs and candles, followed by a bright red parrot that swoops into the audience before landing on his master's outstretched arm. The crowd goes wild.
When the lights come up at 10:30, people pour into the lobby, and kids scatter. Some head for the merchandise counter, begging their parents for a Greg Frewin T-shirt, a DVD, even just a poster. Others line up to have their photo taken with Cashmere the tiger, in an illusion that makes it look like you're trapped in a cage with the massive feline. (The $17 goes to supporting the animals, says the sign near the front of the line.)
A few minutes later, Frewin emerges from backstage to stand behind the counter. Parents and children wait to shake his hand and get an autograph, and he stays there patiently-happily-until he's talked to every last one.
As the crowd thins out, Frewin plops into a chair to chat with a few friends who've made the trek from Toronto. But his night is far from over. Before heading home, he'll disappear backstage to help load Cashmere, Shamira and his cougar, Shiva, into their cages and onto his truck. Then he'll make the 45-minute drive back to his compound outside town, stopping along the way to pick up fresh meat for the animals. Once they're unloaded and settled into their indoor cages (each about the size of a small bedroom, Frewin says), he'll feed them their raw meat and several vitamin supplements, give them some water and settle them in for the night. By the time he gets to bed, it'll be after 1 a.m. "Going on vacation is not easy," says Frewin. "It's not like you can just ask your neighbours to drop by."
The next morning, he'll wake up at 7 to feed the tiger cubs. Soon after, it'll be time to load everyone back on the truck and head to the theatre for another show.