Mischief Theatre Brings Their Magic To A New Show In New York City

Mischief Theatre, the forces behind the Play That Goes Wrong and Peter Pan Goes Wrong have a new off Broadway show. The delightfully madcap Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion, is currently playing at New World Stages.

The show revolves around a mentalist (Henry Lewis) who has invested all his efforts into creating the most memorable magic show he can deliver. Down on his luck and recently divorced he has enlisted his pal, (Jonathan Sayer), to assist. The trouble is that the mentalist is mostly terrible magician and mangles most of his tricks. “When he hits rock bottom it’s his friend who helps him get back up and he comes back fighting,” says the show’s director Hannah Sharkey who began working with Mischief in 2018 as a resident director.

The troupe’s first foray into magic was doing the show Magic Goes Wrong. Mischief Theatre co-founders Henry Lewis, Johnathan Sayer and Henry Shields created the piece with titan magicians Penn Jillette and Teller. They performed the show on London’s west End and on tour in the United Kingdom. “We learned loads about magic from Penn and Teller who were brilliant,” says Lewis.

Two of the characters in the show were the Mind Mangler, a truly terrible mind reader, and his fumbling audience stooge Steve. “They had this very dysfunctional relationship where they were kind of weirdly mutually reliant on each other. And then when the Edinburgh Fringe Festival came along, Henry said, ‘oh, I’d love to just do an hour of that.’ We all really enjoyed those characters,” says Sayer. “We had so much fun with them we thought, let’s give them their own show,” adds Lewis.

After doing that first Mind Mangler show for the Edinburgh Festival in 2022 they expanded the piece and toured it throughout the United Kingdom before bringing Mind Mangler off Broadway to New World Stages. “It’s so fun to do magic because you can have audience participation, especially with mind reading,” says Lewis. “You are asking people to do things and it’s always a little bit different.”

For Mind Mangler writers Lewis, Sayer and Shields the allure was also having such a great genre, like magic, to mine. “Our work tends to really sing when the subject matter you’re dealing with takes itself very seriously, so you can undermine and undercut it,” says Sayer. “The Mind Mangler thinks he’s Derren Brown, but he’s just not. The audience can tell how some of the tricks are done. Or when there is magic in the show the Mind Mangler almost doesn’t know how he’s done it.”

For Sharkey the joy of the show is never lost on her. “I laugh every time I go to work, what more can you ask for?,” she says. Sharkey adds that she and the team are always pushing to improve and striving to get more laughs and gasps from the audience. “Henry and Jon bring something new to the table every show.,” she says. “But the biggest joy of all is sitting in the audience, watching people leave their troubles at the door and getting lost in the laughter.”

Jeryl Brunner: What do you love about working with Mischief Theatre?

Hannah Sharkey: Things have to go perfectly right to go flawlessly wrong. For example, I directed the Play That Goes Wrong in Lisbon in Portuguese. And even in a language I don’t speak I could tell when the structure of the joke had changed in the translation. It’s all about rhythm. One wrong step and you can weaken the next ten jokes. As a director I love that challenge.

Brunner: And what might surprise people about Henry Lewis, Henry Shields and Jonathan Sayer?

Sharkey: Henry, Hen [Lewis] and Jonathan, [the three Mind Mangler writers] all have a different sense of humor. That’s what makes them a brilliant writing trio. Now I know them better I can tell who likely wrote different jokes. But that means whatever the audience’s taste, there should be something in there to make them chuckle.

Brunner: When did you know you had to be a director? Was there a moment you can point to that helped set you on your path?

Sharkey: From the age of about eight I used to put on plays in my friend’s parents’ attic every Christmas. I charged the neighbors a pound each, I numbered cushions with seat numbers, I took it all very seriously! But it was in my first year at drama school that I realized I wanted to be a director, rather than any other role in the theatre.

We did a devised piece based on Zorba the Greek at a beautiful theatre in Cornwall called The Minack. I only had a small part; I played a lampshade. But lots of things I had created in the devising process made it into the show, and I remember sitting offstage hearing the audience laugh in these scenes and thinking yes this is where I want to be, creating worlds for the audience to explore.