INTERVIEW: Brynolf & Ljung are stalking New York City with their magical tricks
Photo: Stalker features, from left, Peter Brynolf and Jonas Ljung, better known as Brynolf & Ljung. Photo courtesy of Jeremy Daniel / Provided by The Press Room with permission.
Peter Brynolf and Jonas Ljung, known in the magic community as Brynolf & Ljung, have set up shop at New World Stages in Midtown Manhattan for an off-Broadway run of their acclaimed illusion show Stalker, which utilizes surprising trickery, mind-blowing mentalism, audience participation and funny jokes to showcase the duo’s obvious skills in the art of magic.
“It played for one-and-a-half years in Sweden,” Ljung said in a recent phone interview about Stalker’s origins in their native Sweden. “It played to great success, and it sold out performances. So, at the end of that run, we really wanted to take this somewhere else, and we decided the place we most of all would like to play this show is New York. That decision was one-and-a-half year ago.”
Brynolf added that Stalker was written during the pandemic, a time period when artists, including magicians, needed to channel their creative energy into new and unusual avenues. Brynolf & Ljung stayed busy even though they were away from in-person audience members, and what they developed, somewhat surprisingly, proved prophetic. Their pandemic-written piece relies heavily on audiences getting up, sometimes getting on stage and participating along with the illusionists. It must have been difficult during lockdown to ever envision such closeup magic taking place again.
“We had the premiere in autumn ‘21 in Sweden, and then we played for slightly more than a year,” Brynolf said. “And then we thought let’s move this to New York, and then we had to rewrite some stuff in it.”
Ljung added: “We got [such] rave reviews and good feedback from the audiences that we almost felt immediately that we have something that’s really unique. Now, in Sweden, we got to play this in smaller stadiums, so we played this for an audience of between 700 and 1,800 each night. And it’s really remarkable because we don’t use any magic props in this show. It’s just like a TV production. The show is really heavily built on the interaction with audiences, so it’s a highly unusual magic show. I think the both of us, as well as the director Edward af Sillén, felt pretty early on that this is something unique. Let’s take this to an even broader audience.”
Brynolf said that Stalker feels real because the two magicians are working tirelessly over the course of 90 minutes to ensure the interactions with audience members are authentic and unplanned. They swore — and this reporter believes every word they said — that there are only real ticket buyers at New World Stages and no personal friends of Brynolf & Ljung.
“That’s very important,” Brynolf said. “We want the feeling to be that of real magic experience. For people to really feel that, they have to be part of it, and they have to feel that the other people who are part of it are also in it for real and experience things for real. The participation, I would say, kind of [helps] the illusion of the magic. … There’s so much unbelievable stuff that is happening in this show, so we really have to make the audience aware that there are no stooges, no plants ever used in the show. Come in this close, so everyone can see the people who are participating, their actual reactions, close up on camera. I think it’s really vital to the show so everyone can understand that this is for real. We’re not using actors in the audience.”
Of course, with a show that relies heavily on audience participation, each evening in the theater will be slightly different than the previous performance. This keeps everyone and everything on edge, and the unexpected often occurs.
“We are aware of this, so we take a lot of care to make everyone feel comfortable, even people who are in the beginning very nervous of participating,” Ljung said. “We make them, hopefully, at ease. … But that being said, this show really balances on the edge of what’s possible to do, magic-wise, so from time to time things go in an unusual way in the show. And we have to take care of that, but that’s the very nature of this show. It’s very alive, and it doesn’t really affect things that much because there’s so many things happening in this show. So, even if things go as we don’t expect, it will come close in the end anyway.”
Brynolf added: “We’ve been working like this for 20 years almost with using a lot of audience in all the shows. Stalker is actually the third largest show we have done, so we did two more tours with other shows in Sweden before this. And those were also heavily dependent on the audiences, so we have developed this way of working for a pretty long time.”
Penn & Teller, the world-famous illusionists who perform their show in Las Vegas, are billed as producers of Stalker, and they recently appeared (out of thin air) with Brynolf & Ljung on stage in Manhattan. This was a most special performance for the two Swedish magicians who have been idolizing Penn & Teller their entire lives. They took that inspiration with them as they ascended the heights in the magic industry, appearing on Britain’s Got Talent and developing their own TV series, Brynolf & Ljung — Street Magic.
“Penn & Teller has meant so much,” Ljung said. “They reinvented magic when they started out. We basically grew up with them with their TV shows, and they affected us a lot because a lot of the magic at the time wasn’t that interesting. There was a very good amount of really good magicians even then, but a lot of magic that was around then was a bit stale, non-inventive. So, Penn & Teller affected that a lot. Also, if you go and see Penn & Teller’s show in Vegas right now, it’s still inventing itself almost every night. They’re adding new things that blow our mind, and then since we got to know them 12 years ago, Penn & Teller has been very supportive. So, we were so happy when they agreed to be producers of this show. That meant really a lot.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Stalker, featuring Brynolf & Ljung, is currently playing New World Stages in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
