The Magic Show/Trivia


 * Cut Song: Several of the original script's more memorable songs were cut from the 1980 performance which was recorded and released on video, most notably "Charmin's Lament", "West End Avenue" and "Solid Silver Platform Shoes".
 * Hey, It's That Guy!/Retroactive Recognition: The original cast included Cheryl Barnes, Robert LuPone, Anita Morris and David Ogden Stiers (a few years away from his role as Charles Emerson Winchester on M*A*S*H).
 * And in the opening night band, Paul Shaffer, later bandleader on The David Letterman Show.
 * Cheryl Barnes may be recognizable to some as Hud's wife/girlfriend from Hair, who sings "Easy to be Hard".
 * Shout-Out: "Up To His Old Tricks" repeatedly references some of the great names of stage magic -- specifically The Amazing Dunninger and Harry Houdini.
 * When Charmin appears, a joke about the old "Don't squeeze the Charmin" advertising campaign is made.
 * "The Goldfarb Variations" is a reference to Johann Sebastian Bach's harpsichord piece "The Goldberg Variations". And like so many Bach pieces, it's a fugue.
 * Feldman namedrops several celebrities, mostly from the late 1960s-early 1970s (Rex Reed, Jascha Heifetz, Karen Horney, Joanne Woodward, Conrad Hilton, and Carlo Ponti), as part of his song "Style". (It's probably a testament to just how honest he is about having met them that one -- German psychoanalyst Karen Horney -- had died some twenty years before the show opened.)
 * Star-Making Role: For Doug Henning.
 * Unintentional Period Piece: This is one of the reasons the 1980 filmed performance underwent so many changes -- songs like "Solid Silver Platform Shoes" were thought to be terribly dated less than a decade after the show premiered on Broadway. Also a number of references ended up very period-specific, such as Manny envisioning the future version of his club as the "Fillmore Passaic" in "The Goldfarb Variations".