There is a moment in Jamie Allan’s Amaze where the magician holds up his childhood Fisher-Price magic kit – a battered plastic relic from the early 1980s – and asks the audience to remember what it felt like to believe in something without understanding how it worked. It is a disarmingly quiet beat in a show otherwise bristling with holograms, laser arrays, and audience members’ own smartphones being hijacked mid-performance. And it is, paradoxically, the trick that lands hardest. Because what Allan has pulled off in the past year – first at the Criterion Theatre in London’s West End, then at New World Stages in Manhattan – is not merely a feat of conjuring. It is a feat of reinvention, one that has turned a personal memoir into Off-Broadway’s most improbable hit.
Amaze opened at New World Stages on 13 August 2025, following a preview run that began on 20 July. By early April 2026, the production had recouped its entire initial investment after just 36 weeks and 363 performances. It has since been extended for a fourth time, with tickets now on sale through 31 January 2027. In July, it will officially cross the one-year mark. Two Drama Desk nominations – for Unique Theatrical Experience and Outstanding Puppetry – followed. Penn & Teller, whose own Las Vegas residency has defined American magic for decades, offered a characteristically succinct endorsement: “You will love this show. We did.”
The numbers alone are remarkable for an Off-Broadway magic show. But the story behind them – of a British magician who spent three decades refining a hybrid art form that most purists still regard with suspicion – is the more compelling narrative.
The iMagician Comes of Age
Allan, born Jamie Allan Nicklin on 15 February 1977 in England, performed his first magic show at the age of eight in a cabaret club in Market Bosworth. His father led the show band Second City Sound; his mother was a singer. The house was steeped in performance. By his mid-teens, Allan had premiered what he called his “iMagic” creation on ITV’s This Morning in 1995, using iPads, laser beams, and interactive social media to reimagine the classic stage illusion. The term “iPad Magician” is his invention. No other performer, as his official biography notes, has assembled their own team to programme custom software and work with cutting-edge technology such as augmented reality, 3D video mapping, and drones.
The gamble paid off in stages. Allan designed illusions for Sting, Tim Minchin, Katherine Jenkins, Leona Lewis, Billy Ocean, and Jools Holland. He appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us, The One Show, BBC Breakfast, Michael McIntyre’s Big Show, and Grand Cabaret du Monde. He starred in the West End production Impossible and toured the UK for three consecutive years with iMagician, which opened at the Garrick Theatre in 2015. In 2018, iMagician debuted at Chicago’s 1,525-seat Harris Theatre, becoming the highest-selling magic show in the city’s history. In 2021, he co-created the multimillion-dollar productions Illusionarium in Toronto and Magic Immersive in Chicago. His book Everything arrived in 2023.
Yet for all this, Allan remained – as the Chicago Tribune‘s Chris Jones observed – “a masterclass in magic performance as emotional engagement.” Jones compared Allan’s artistic instincts to those of Stephen Sondheim and Tony Kushner, a comparison that would seem grandiose were it not so precisely apt. Like Sondheim, Allan understands that spectacle without interiority is merely noise.
Amaze as Autobiography
The crucial distinction of Amaze – the show that has crystallised Allan’s reputation – is its confessional structure. This is not a magic show with a narrative grafted on. It is a narrative that happens to be delivered through magic. Allan tells the story of his childhood, his parents’ support, their deaths, and his journey from a boy with a plastic trick set to a man who vanishes motorcycles on the maiden voyage of the RMS Queen Mary 2.
The set design, by Damien Stanton, is modelled on the attic of his parents’ pub, where the young Allan practised. Nineteen-eighties movie posters – Star Wars, Labyrinth, E.T., The NeverEnding Story, Ghostbusters – line the walls alongside Radio Shack commercials playing on side screens. A shelf of nostalgic toys and books sits in a corner. The visual language is deliberately retro, grounding the digital wizardry that follows in something tactile and remembered.
Time Out’s Adam Feldman, who awarded the show four out of five stars, noted that Allan “stakes out an appealing middle ground” between close-up magic for small audiences and full-scale Broadway spectacles. “The venue is big enough to accommodate a few large-scale effects, including levitation and a motorcycle,” Feldman wrote, “but sufficiently intimate for Allan’s personal narrative, which centers on his discovery of magic as a child.”
The audience participation segments – attendees write a childhood toy on a card and slip it into a hat, later used in the finale; everyone’s phones become props in a digital sleight – blur the line between performer and witness. New York Theatre Guide’s Caroline Cao, reviewing the August 2025 opening, called it “a memoir and a family-friendly intro to magic,” praising Allan’s “optimistic idea that supportive parents are the most important ingredient for magic lovers.”
The Business of Wonder
The commercial trajectory of Amaze tells its own story. Starvox Entertainment, led by CEO Corey Ross, produces the Off-Broadway run. Ross, in a statement to Playbill, said: “In today’s world, audiences need a space for childlike wonder and pure awe. We’re proud to have brought forth a production that offers both.”
That a magic show has recouped before its first anniversary in New York – a market notoriously hostile to non-musical Off-Broadway productions – is a data point worth pausing over. Magic shows, as Feldman observed, have been “popping up like mushrooms” in New York. They tend toward two extremes: intimate close-up gigs for twenty people, or sprawling touring spectacles like The Illusionists. Amaze occupies the gap between. At $59 to $200 a ticket, it is priced below Broadway but above most Off-Broadway fare, and it has found an audience willing to pay a premium for something that is neither a play nor a concert nor a traditional magic act.
The show runs two hours and fifteen minutes with one intermission. It is recommended for ages six to one hundred and six – a range that reflects Allan’s insistence that Amaze is not a niche product. The TripAdvisor reviews, averaging 4.8 out of 5 from 24 ratings, consistently emphasise the show’s cross-generational appeal. One reviewer from the UK called it “a heartfelt, personal performance that leans heavily into stories about his childhood and family.” Another, visiting from the United States, wrote: “The feats of magic are embedded in a very emotional family tale, making a good choice for a family.”
Magic in the Age of Screens
What makes Amaze more than a commercial curiosity is its argument – implicit rather than declared – about what live performance can still do in an era of algorithmic entertainment. Allan’s technology is not decorative. The iPads, the holographic projections, the augmented reality sequences are integrated into the storytelling, functioning as extensions of the narrative rather than interruptions to it. When his audience’s own phones become instruments of illusion, the effect is not merely clever. It is a reclamation of the device that most often distracts us from the present moment, turning it into a tool of communal attention.
The Chicago Tribune‘s comparison to Kushner is not as strained as it might appear. Kushner’s Angels in America used theatrical spectacle – angels crashing through ceilings, scenes set in Antarctica – to make the political personal. Allan’s show operates in a smaller register but with a similar principle: the extraordinary is most affecting when it emerges from the ordinary. A child’s magic set. A parent’s encouragement. The quiet grief of loss. The noise and light that follow.
Allan’s membership of the Inner Magic Circle – the highest honour the Magic Circle can bestow, placing him alongside Harry Houdini, David Copperfield, and Derren Brown – is a professional credential. But Amaze is the work that justifies it. Not because the illusions are technically flawless (some, as critics have noted, are more impressive than others), but because they are in service of something larger than their own cleverness.
What Remains
As Amaze approaches its second year in New York, with a fourth extension now confirmed through January 2027, the question is whether Allan has found a durable model or a fortunate anomaly. Magic has always existed on the margins of legitimate theatre, tolerated but rarely respected. Amaze has not solved that problem. But it has demonstrated that a magic show built on genuine autobiography, executed with technical ambition and emotional specificity, can find an audience large and committed enough to sustain itself in the most competitive live-entertainment market in the world.
In one of the show’s quieter moments, Allan talks about the philosophies of patience and wonder – the idea that magic, at its core, is a meditative discipline. It is a claim that sounds pretentious in the abstract and entirely reasonable in the context of watching a man make a motorcycle appear from thin air while telling you about his mother. The trick, in the end, is not the motorcycle. The trick is making you care.
Amaze is playing at New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, New York. Tickets are available via Telecharge and the box office.
