By JESSICA NEU
I was supposed to see Henok Negash in Meant to Be at Liberty Magic last Wednesday on Henok’s opening night. However, I decided to go out with friends the night before. Wednesday morning, I woke up not feeling well, only to learn shortly after that one of my friends who I had been with the previous night tested positive for COVID-19. Quickly realizing the imminent fate of my symptoms, I rescheduled my time at Liberty Magic for the following Thursday, August 15th.
This rescheduling prompted me to bring my seven-year-old son as my plus one. To his immense delight, Henok chose him to select a card in his first trick of the evening. I could hear my son attempting to recount this experience to my husband as soon as he awoke this morning.
I tell you this in the spirit of the central theme that Henok uses to anchor Meant to Be. As the title suggests, Henok, who considers himself a “generalist” in the magic world,” combines the idea of miracles with magic to remind audiences of how fortunate they are to be precisely where they are in their lives in this given moment.
Henok’s show features sleight-of-hand tricks but brilliantly reframes magic as miracles. Henok explains how we witness miracles every day but are often too distracted to notice them or denounce the spectacular as a mere coincidence. Henok’s storytelling, sleight of hand, and illusionist expertise will have you believing in miracles by the end of his performance – so as long as you pay close attention. Henok’s intricate tricks involve ongoing audience participation and are intertwined to create several full-circle moments.
He grounds his show by introducing John Littlewood’s Law of Miracles paired with a story about when he experienced a miracle of his own. The story involves Henok’s time living in LA and moving to Chicago, where he currently resides. The miracle in his story could be seen as a coincidence, as could pretty much anything that happens in our lives. But Henok’s convincing rhetoric prompts you to shift your perspective on our everyday occurrences.
Henok is also quite witty, and his extemporaneous humor adds a sense of charm to his performance. You will laugh out loud as he proves how audience members’ replies to random questions can translate into his diary or how the serial number on an audience member’s dollar bill can be predicted through a card trick. Henok defies the odds and leans into miracles.
Meant to Be is also deeply moving. Henok prompts audiences to consider what would happen if just one element of their life was different. Where would you be today? Who would you share your life with? Henok pairs his talk of miracles with the notion of trust. We must trust the magician and what we see with our own two eyes. Henok makes the audience members’ rings link together and reappear in random objects. Henok even asserts that there are more ways to arrange a standard deck of 52 playing cards than grains of sand in the world. Yet, he manages to predict the order of the cards chosen by the audience without fail. The layperson will likely never know how he achieved such illusions, but we must trust what we saw. And what I saw was real but unexplainable. Truly miraculous, I suppose.
What would have happened had I not gone out the Tuesday before when I was originally supposed to see Meant to Be? I may not have been sick the next day and still have been able to attend my originally scheduled performance. I would have seen a different version of the show, with a different plus one and different fellow audience members. Instead, I was momentarily connected with Liz, Jennifer, Jackie “with a J,” Scott, and the several other dozen audience members who attended Thursday’s performance. But most importantly, I was with my son. Who was further inspired by his love of cards and created a core memory. Thank you for my miracle, Henok. It was meant to be.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Henok Negash in Meant to Be, at Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s Liberty Magic, runs through September 1, 2024. Tickets at: https://trustarts.org/production/88448/list_performances
Categories: Reviews
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