About World-Class Magic Shows

The Magic Showcase puts several of the best magicians in Baltimore on one stage, plus a few smuggled in from elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic, and lets them take turns making you doubt your own eyes. There's close-up work performed near enough that you should be able to catch it (you won't), comedy, mentalism of the sort that sends couples home arguing about who picked which card, and headline magic for anyone who still thinks they've figured out the evening.

The lineup changes from show to show, which is rather the point. Each night brings a different handful of people who have spent an unreasonable portion of their lives practicing things most adults abandoned around age nine, and now and then someone unannounced turns up and joins them. We don't always know who. Occasionally neither do they. It all happens at Poe's Magic Theatre, inside the Lord Baltimore Hotel.