This is Ozarks at Large. It's not surprising Chris Funk makes his livelihood on stage in front of audiences. He was in music theory classes by age 5, learning the violin soon after, then the guitar.
Twice, on Sept. 20, he'll be at the Jones Center in Springdale to perform magic. Chris Funk, also known as The Wonderist, says his upbringing in music wasn't for naught. The discipline gained from, say, Royal Conservatory exams works well for the meticulous dominion of illusions.
"Oh, 100 percent. I mean, it definitely ingrained, I guess you could say like a regular rhythm of practice, of what it looks like to practice an effect, a routine, my lines being on stage."
Chris Funk was in his living room in Edmonton, Alberta, when we reached him just before he started his current tour. You can catch some of his greatest hits online, including a performance on Penn & Teller: Fool Us.
His shows are rooted in magic tradition. He executes a standard, making a specific card rise hands-free out of the deck, but his rising card trick comes with an updated take.
"Very old, old effect in the world of magic. And my new spin on it is I play an instrument while I do that, telling a story about my life, and it just kind of transcends it to a whole new level."
Music is very much his calling. He's The Wonderist, but he's also very much a storyteller. He cites a vaudeville rule for keeping the audience with him.
“Perfect it, and make it look spontaneous.”
He also keeps his audiences engaged in another way — by inclusion. He says this gives his shows a nice balance for the stage work to be successful. He follows a precise plan, but bringing audience members into that plan can mean a few onstage detours, so nothing is quite the same twice.
"The way I describe it is like a bike wheel. You know, a bicycle has the strength to hold up a pretty heavy person, and yet it's just these thin spokes that are putting this wheel together that create that stability. So in the show, I know what I want to happen. And those are my spokes. I write the spokes, but that leaves all of this open space for whatever to take place. And you never know what's going to happen. I never know what someone's going to say to me, how they're going to respond to me or anything like that. It always just kind of makes it fair game to use."
With improv on the spot and working in front of a live audience, like he'll do twice on Sept. 20 at the Jones Center in Springdale, also means he can provide surprise.
"I guess the response that I get the most from people is like, I didn't expect that. I think the one thing that really affects the world of magic these days are the TV specials, or the Netflix specials, or the YouTube specials or videos, because there's cuts. I don't have the ability of having a cut in a live show. Like you see it all. If I make a mistake, you see it. And I'm human and I've made mistakes. Luckily, my audiences had no idea that I did make a mistake because I always have plan B ready to go. But there's no cuts. So at the end of the show, once they've seen the entire journey of everything, yeah, the biggest response is I didn't expect that."
Chris Funk, The Wonderist, will perform at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 20, at the Jones Center in Springdale. He talked with us from his home in Edmonton, Alberta.
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