Performance Monday at Denison library

**Duffy Hudson as Harry Houdini, about to escape from a pair of handcuffs.** Photo courtesy of Duffy Hudson’s website, duffyhudson.com.

Actor Duffy Hudson will bring Harry Houdini to life in a performance at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, April 8, at Norelius Community Library.

The event is free to attend.

People may remember Hudson as the actor who portrayed Edgar Allan Poe at the library in October.

Hudson portrays a number of notable persons in one-man shows. Others that he portrays are George Burns, Albert Einstein and Audie Murphy.

Hudson said he selected Houdini as he was looking for an entertainer to portray. Friends who are magicians invite him to The Magic Castle in Hollywood each year to do his Poe performance. Magicians are obsessed with Poe in general, he said.

“At some point one of the magicians said, ‘You ought to do Houdini.’ I like Houdini but I didn’t know enough magic. Several of my magician friends said they would teach me all the magic,” Hudson explained.

Another encouragement to portray Houdini came from a less obvious group of people.

“I was doing Edgar Allan Poe at a middle school – 400 kids. After the show we did a little Q & A, and one of the kids asked about the other shows I did. And they asked what shows I was thinking of doing. I named a number of shows I was thinking about. No reaction. But when I said Houdini, these 400 middle schoolers started screaming. I didn’t know Houdini was so relevant to kids, even. That really convinced me that it would be a good way to go,” Hudson said.

Hudson said he gets the idea of portraying people from history all the time. He begins his research, and for some characters, it just doesn’t pan out.

“I just don’t feel it or for some reason it just doesn’t seem like it’s a good idea. But Houdini was definitely a good idea,” Hudson said. “I picked him because a lot of people told me Houdini would be popular, and I’ve always been fascinated with magic.”

He remembers watching Tony Curtis portray Houdini in a movie. That inspired him to go to the library to learn more about the magician.

After learning from his magician friends, Hudson was able to incorporate a variety of tricks in his portrayal of Houdini.

“People (at Monday’s performance) can expect to see the life of Houdini revealed in an interesting and fun way,” he said. “I’ll escape from a straitjacket, I’ll escape from handcuffs, I’ll swallow needles and do some card tricks, all the while telling you about his life from his point of view – so it will be Houdini telling you about his life – and what his life is really about and what he learned through all of his struggles of being an immigrant, being a poor kid from the Midwest and making his way in a world where there really weren’t too many magicians making a living.”

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Hudson said he finds a kinship in portraying a showman like Houdini.

“A couple of weeks before I performed the first show, I was still working on it, pulling it all together, and I was quite nervous about it,” he said. “Then a magician called and said he was bringing a club of magicians to see my show. I said I wasn’t really a magician, that I was an actor. And he just laughed and said, ‘We’re all actors, acting like magicians.’

“That was a really helpful thing to understand. It took a lot of the pressure off because the magic I did know, I could do very well. Magic is such a deep subject. There’s so much to learn,” Hudson said. “You can spend your entire lifetime just studying card manipulations or any one aspect of magic. It’s really quite a deep subject and field.”

Hudson said the show is a lot of fun and encouraged parents to bring their kids, although not very young children.

“It’s not a little kids magic show. It’s a biographical performance about the life of Houdini,” he explained. “Middle schoolers on up love it, and we’ll do a Q&A afterwards, and it’s truly a lot of fun.”

Hudson said it is a great blessing to keep the legacy alive of the people he portrays.

“It’s wonderful to be able to keep people’s legacies alive and bring their work out into the world, so people go to the library to read about these people and become inspired by these people and follow their own dreams,” he said. “Everybody that I portray had a dream they followed; all of them did. And that’s really the goal for this kind of work, to inspire people to be who they can be.”

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