Evolving from modest street acts to world-class performances, Northern Nevada’s best magic show is a whirlwind of dazzling illusions and high-energy entertainment headlined by a couple of high school friends

Ten minutes before the Magique show begins, 12 performers and crew members disappear into a labyrinth of dark hallways behind the Nugget Casino Resort’s Celebrity Showroom stage. Off stage, two laptops play soft music for audience members as they file into the room to find their seats. On one of the screens, a small pop-up window asks if the show is ready to start. The “OK” button is highlighted.

“I hit ‘Enter’ at eight o’clock and everything just goes,” says acclaimed magician and illusionist Kevin Jeffrey. 

Lord Caruso and Kevin Jeffrey pose on stage with magician’s assistant Savannah Shutz in the “bird cage” trick

He watches on a monitor above his head as the audience settles into their booths and tables.

Tap.

The sound and lights shift to a hyper pace. Eight showgirls wearing sequin dresses and tall feathered headpieces flood the 50-year-old stage. They push a large table into the center of the chaos. Two white sheets draped over the table rise, then rip away to reveal Jeffrey and fellow magician Lord Caruso. 

The magic show has begun.

For 90 minutes, the high-speed spectacle pauses only once for a food and beverage intermission. The rest of the time, showgirls dance to popular music while magician’s assistant Savannah Shutz somehow avoids flaming spears, a giant sword and dismemberment (to name a fraction of her harrowing feats).

Behind the scenes, the showgirls and two stagehands hustle to keep pace with the automated light and sound system. 

“We’re getting changed quickly, but one of us is pulling the rope or pushing a prop on stage,” says dance captain Brianna Sherwood. “Everybody is doing something backstage that has nothing to do with their actual performance. I don’t think people realize how much of that we do.”

Despite running a high-octane stage show 80 nights a year—each complete with more than 20 grand illusions, choreographed dance routines and 100-plus custom costumes—the small team remains calm under pressure. They trust each other, but most of all, they trust Jeffrey and Caruso’s generosity, fairness and 35 years of experience creating magic. From small street acts in downtown Sparks to million-dollar disappearing acts on Carnival cruise lines, the duo has spent their careers dazzling audiences around the world.

Building a Bag of Tricks

For one of the first illusions—the Glass Hat Box—Caruso shackles Jeffrey’s hands, then lowers him into a large plexiglass cylinder. Caruso pulls up a sheet, then drops it, and they’ve suddenly switched places. Jeffrey, now standing on top of the cylinder, throws the sheet up and drops it again to reveal Shutz standing in the open box, with Caruso having disappeared entirely.

Jeffrey’s tall, broad silhouette stands in contrast to Caruso’s smaller, modest frame. Jeffrey consistently wears black jeans, T-shirts and an array of colorful blazers throughout the night. In contrast, Caruso, the show’s costume designer and maker, switches into various bold, extravagant outfits. Their differences are reminiscent of Penn and Teller; Jeffrey acts as the speaker, while Caruso remains silent.

Magician and costume designer Lord Caruso prepares for the show in his dressing room

Earlier in the evening, Caruso could be seen repeatedly crouching atop the hat box, concentrating. Seconds later, he appeared sitting in the dressing room, stretching and staring into a mirror. He always feels nervous before a show, he admits, and practices positioning his feet on the lid. Many years ago, he fell off during an act and worries it could happen again. 

After performing the trick, his nerves settle, and he smiles for the first time all night.

Jeffrey and Caruso started performing this illusion—a derivative of Houdini’s Metamorphosis—more than 30 years ago when they were still teenagers. The high school friends wore elaborate, sparkling costumes inspired by famous magicians, like Siegfried and Roy.

“Everything was meant for stage lighting, and here we were in the bright sun on a Saturday,” Jeffrey recalls of those early days.

For their various street shows around Reno and Sparks, they cobbled together homemade pyrotechnics using gunpowder, galvanized pipes and model rocket engines to create whizzing noises, explosions and sparkles. 

These days, they use confetti cannons and leave the dazzling costumes to the showgirls.

Catching Their Break 

In 1993, the pair was performing a Houdini escape at the Best in the West Nugget Rib Cook-Off when they met the general manager of the Tahoe Biltmore. 

“He said, ‘I love what you just did! Do you have a show?’ So, of course, we lied and said we had a whole show,” Jeffrey says. “We had six weeks to take five minutes’ worth of material and turn it into an hour.”  

Magique showgirls dance during one of the only two numbers with no magic tricks

The Tahoe Biltmore (closed since 2022) gave them a weeklong show, which they parlayed into an entire summer. That eventually led to opening acts at the Horizon Casino Lake Tahoe (now Golden Nugget Lake Tahoe), followed by an offer to perform at sea on a Holland America Line cruise ship. 

They took the job, then got fired two weeks later.

“It was the wrong show for the wrong crowd,” Jeffrey says. “We had brought a 12-foot python with us, and one of the Diamond customers was so mortally offended that she wanted to disembark and never sail again.” 

But the crew and other passengers loved them. They just needed a different audience.

“The [Holland America Line] entertainment director didn’t want to give up on us,” Jeffrey says. 

Through 1999, they commuted from Reno to various ports to perform their shows on Carnival ships, rebuilding the set each week, devising new illusions and even altering ship stages without permission.

Lord Caruso performs a magic trick toward the end of the show, turning a small piece of paper into thousands of tiny pieces of confetti

Carnival later invested $1 million in expanding the show, which they called New Wave Magic at the time, directing Jeffrey and Caruso to produce unique performances for multiple ships traveling international waters. 

Taking their act to the next level, they teamed up with renowned Las Vegas choreographer Mistinguett around 2007 to choreograph and design their magic shows. 

“I was in my 50s and had already worked for a production company for 30 years,” says Mistinguett, who agreed to join the team.

Mistinguett brought the “old showgirl class” by incorporating the Vegas-style vintage costumes that no one really uses anymore, says Sherwood, the dance captain. 

Mistinguett also brought the intensity.  

“In production shows like this, costume changes need to be done in 60 seconds,” Mistinguett says. “If you can’t change in one minute, there’s something wrong with the costume or something wrong with the person taking it off.”

In the dressing room, every dancer stacks their costume pieces in a particular order so they can sprint off stage, down the dark hallway, peel one outfit off, then layer the next one on in time for the following number. Glittering jackets, feathers, tops and bottoms litter every surface of the room.

‘It’s Very Empowering’

“I had been a dancer on and off since I was little,” says Shutz, the magician’s assistant. “I always loved Mistinguett, so to be a part of that world would be legendary. It was everything I ever wanted.” 

Shutz started on Jeffrey and Caruso’s Madame Houdini show in Atlantic City, New Jersey, 13 years ago, which alternated with another one of the duo’s shows. Shutz danced for both, but wanted more out of the experience.

Savannah Shutz survives multiple flaming spikes every night in the “spiker box”

“After five years, I thought, ‘How can I weasel my way into these tricks?’ It felt more natural to do the tricks than it did to be a dancer,” she says. 

Backstage, she warms up and stretches like most performers, but her favorite part of the job is waiting quietly in a tight, dark space, with just the sound of her breath and the muted music, audience and magicians outside.

“It’s the only time I’m in a meditative state of mind,” she says.

Shutz, who is about the same height as Jeffrey, stands above the other dancers. When she folds her muscular body into small boxes and cages, appearing or disappearing on stage, the tricks feel more impossible, more stunning, more resplendent.

“I just feel like a powerful goddess woman,” she says of performing her job. “It’s very empowering. It’s good to feel that as a woman on stage.” 

Stepping Into the Spotlight

The intense music keeps everyone moving through the set pieces. 

“The show is very stylized for (Jeffrey’s) personality,” Mistinguett says. “This isn’t like other magic shows when a guy comes out in a tip-top suit, slick and shiny. He comes out in black jeans, high-top shoes and always a wild hat with a flair of feathers or sparkles of light.” 

Magician’s assistant Savannah Shutz passes through Lord Caruso in one of the show’s many grand illusions

Caruso remains quiet throughout the entire show, while Jeffrey speaks only a few times during transitions, mostly to make the audience laugh or share a quick anecdote. He jokes that he’s not a fan of performers who fill space with too much talking.

“Magique is written for those who have a hard time paying attention in school,” Jeffrey says.

They learned early on that cruise ship patrons will leave if the show gets boring, especially since they see the magic for free. Each number lasts no longer than two minutes and 50 seconds, some much shorter. Sometimes the music and dance tell a story, but only if you can tune in long enough to understand the message.

Mistinguett and Sherwood make sure the show never stops moving by combining complex dance routines with illusions. 

“When you’re watching TV and there’s an awkward pause and it goes black or freezes, how awkward is that?” Mistinguett says.

It’s … very awkward.   

‘COVID be Damned’

In 2020, Jeffrey and Caruso’s shows went dark. Carnival sold off ships as-is and only sometimes shipped props back. All the duo’s connections disappeared.

“By June 2020, we were stir-crazy,” Jeffrey says. “For nine months, we drove 50,000 miles crisscrossing the U.S. looking for theaters.”

Savannah Shutz demonstrates that a mirror is solid by tapping a wand against it to the beat of eerie music

They discovered a 1,200-seat theater in Ohio’s Amish country hosting live shows seven nights a week, while venues in Branson, Missouri, brimmed with spectators for live performances.

“COVID be damned, people were packed in,” Jeffrey says. 

They didn’t perform at any of those theaters, but they took notes. Watching the COVID shows helped hone their ticketing, pacing and show-running skills. By 2021, they returned home to Reno to open at The Theatre, a 200-seat theater in the Keystone Square shopping center. Sherwood and the other six showgirls joined Jeffrey, Caruso and Shutz for nearly four years of performances. 

“We would’ve stayed there forever,” Jeffrey says, but the owner wanted to raise the rent and change the lease agreement.

Fortunately, the Nugget had an immediate opening. 

“The Celebrity Showroom has always been an iconic space within the Nugget, but in recent years it hadn’t been fully activated with consistent entertainment,” says Kaycea Wallin, the Nugget’s vice president of marketing. “Magique brought new life to the venue.”

Showgirls Paige Coats and Tess Dusich prepare for the start of the show

The showroom and its classic booth seating hearken back to the team’s history in the theater business. Mistinguett choreographed shows at the Nugget in the 1980s, while Sherwood’s parents performed in Splash, an aquatic show at the Reno Hilton (now the Grand Sierra Resort) in the 1990s. 

“For me, it’s a full-circle moment being the kid that grew up in the theater watching her parents dance, to being the mom that gets to have a career locally, and my kids now live in the theater and watch the shows,” Sherwood says. 

For his first job in show business, Jeffrey operated the showroom spotlight on the same stage where he now performs four nights a week. He still operates the spotlight—a task that is now fully automated by his own software—just like he did 35 years ago.

But this time it’s pointed at him.

“The Nugget showroom is my favorite out of everywhere I’ve been,” he says.

Mike Higdon was obsessed with the Masked Magician and David Copperfield in the late 1990s. He may or may not have witnessed or heard trade secrets while backstage, but he will never reveal that knowledge to anyone.

Catch the Action

Magique shows four nights a week at the Nugget Casino Resort Celebrity Showroom. Tickets range from $55 for general admission to $435 for a four-person VIP booth. More information and tickets can be found at wethetheatre.com