Two-time America’s Got Talent champion Shin Lim had built some powerful momentum in a short period of time with his show on the Las Vegas Strip when all entertainment took a long break. But the up-and-coming headliner took advantage of the downtime to dig deeper into his own creativity and find bigger, bolder ways to stun his appreciative audiences. Now that he’s the main attraction in the Theater at The Mirage, Lim is expanding his newly reopened production by adding new sleight-of-hand feats and massive illusions that haven’t been performed in that room since the days of Siegfried & Roy.

It must feel great to be able to reopen your show without so many of the restrictions other productions had to deal with.

Yeah, there were so many unknowns. We were debating on opening up months ago, but we have a lot of audience participation in the show; at least my special guest Colin Cloud does—he has a lot of people come up onstage. So it was tricky to figure out how to work around that and wearing masks. Now that all those things died down, it will be a lot easier.

Your show at The Mirage reopened on July 1, and the comeback was announced in late May. When did you move into serious rehearsal and setup mode?

For pretty much all of the (last year) I’ve been super deep into experimenting with new concepts and new effects, doing a lot of trial and error and developing new sleights, all for the show. But also just to have a new repertoire, because you don’t want to always do the same stuff, and I personally get bored if I keep doing the same thing. It was really good to be able to step away from the performance aspect for a while, because it’s a totally different game. Creating is fun and almost like a science project. I’ve been doing a lot of that during my downtime, and then recently it was more about gearing up for shows and putting everything together and rehearsing everything in theater, which has been redesigned.

Will Colin remain a big part of the show?

Yes, but the entire show has changed. The storyline is a lot more personal and a lot more abstract as well, and he plays a kind of narrator, a Morgan Freeman, if you will. We still go back and forth, but it happens in a different way now.

You are known for the meticulous planning and thoughtfulness that goes into your performance. Do you think all this time away from the stage affected that creative process?

I think it changed what people enjoy and how people react to certain tricks, because once you haven’t done that for a long time, you kind of forget how people react to a magic trick. It’s so different from other art forms, still entertaining, but at the same time there’s a puzzling aspect to it, something that fools people. But it was a pretty good sabbatical for me, because it really reset everything in my brain and helped me to focus a lot more on exactly how to create something that’s really different and more personal. I think it was sort of a blessing in disguise, and now I can’t wait for people to see what I’ve created.

Is there something new in the show you’re particularly excited about?

There are three or four moments that are pretty big illusions, and I’ve never done big illusions before. They are interweaved throughout the show sort of unexpectedly. Sometimes it takes a long time to set up for the big, massive illusion, so I wanted to sneak it into the middle, within the closeup tricks, so it throws people off. I’m most excited for that because I’ve never done anything like that for audiences before, and I’m very excited to see those reactions. I hope it works.

The Mirage, 800.745.3000 Ticketmaster

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