Doug Henning

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"Anything the mind can conceive is possible. Nothing is impossible. All you have to do is look within, and you can realize your fondest dreams. I would like to wish each one of you all of life's wonders and a joyful age of enlightenment."

Douglas James Henning (May 3, 1947 – February 7, 2000) was a Canadian magician, illusionist, escape artist and politician, best known for his Broadway shows The Magic Show and Merlin, as well as a long-running series of television specials.

He began learning and doing magic as a child, and performed his first show at the age of 14 at a friend's birthday party. While still in his teens he made several appearances on local TV in Toronto, and hired out as an entertainer for parties. He attended college at McMaster University in Ontario, and while there, he met director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Meatballs and many other films). After graduating from McMaster, Henning was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant which required him to study magic. This he did by traveling and learning from contemporary names in magic, eventually studying under stage magician Tony Slydini, whom he considered his primary teacher of magic.

He came out of his studies with the goal of returning stage magic to the glory days it had enjoyed during the era of Vaudeville and Houdini. To this end he collected backing for a live theatrical show which he called Spellbound, starring himself, directed by Reitman and with music by Howard Shore. After breaking box office records in Toronto, the show caught the attention of New York producers; Henning reworked it, added new songs by Stephen Schwartz, and opened it on Broadway in 1974 as The Magic Show. The blend of spectacular illusions and often light-hearted story was new and brought in the audiences in droves; ultimately it ran for four and a half years, and netted Henning a Tony nomination.

Nine years later he would return to Broadway as the star and producer of Merlin, a musical about the youth of the famous wizard from Arthurian myth. In between his two stage shows, Henning made seven television specials for NBC. He also was a guest star on other performers' specials, made seven appearances on The Tonight Show, and filmed a revised production of The Magic Show in front of a live audience for both broadcast and later video sale.

In the middle 1980s, Henning retired from performing and devoted his life to Transcendental Meditation. In 1992, he ran for parliamentary office in the United Kingdom's general election for Blackpool South in Lancashire as the candidate for the Natural Law Party, a political organization affiliated with Transcendal Meditation. He came in a distant fourth.

He died in February 2000 from liver cancer.

Doug Henning provides examples of the following tropes:

• Escape Artist: While Henning was more about the big illusions of classic stage magic, they often required escape artistry to perform.

• Magical Gesture: Part of the "new look" he gave stage magic was abandoning wands and other similar props in favor of slow, graceful gestures.

• Magicians Are Wizards: While not embracing this trope literally, Henning's lifelong goal was to return a sense of wonder and mystery to stage magic, to make it seem more like "real" magic again after several decades of being essentially ignored.
  • In The Magic Show this is a literal fact for Doug's eponymous character. While the tuxedoed Feldman was a slight-of-hand artist and a down-at-the-heels illusionist, Doug was a practitioner of real magic, performing genuine transformations and summonings.

• New Age Retro Hippie: Henning practically radiated this vibe.

• Porn Stache: Well, he is a 1970s icon.

• Stage Magician: Henning was a famous stylistic subversion of this kind of performer. Most famously, he rejected the tuxedo, top hat and clean shaven look cliche and opted to have more of a hippie day-glo look along with an earnest enthusiasm which help revitalized the magic show as a popular entertainment in the 1970s.