AMAZE Magic

AMAZE, billed in full as Jamie Allan's Amaze, is a magic show with a story. The British illusionist Jamie Allan mixes classic conjuring with modern technology, from iPads to large-scale stage illusions, and threads it all together with the tale of his own childhood and how he became a magician. Allan himself calls it part one-man play, part magic show.

It is the show's New York debut, at Stage 5 of New World Stages, the smallest theater in the complex, with no more than 199 seats. That means big illusions happen just a few feet from the audience. Previews began on July 20, 2025, and the show opened on August 13, 2025. First announced to run until November 2, 2025, it has been extended four times, and as of October 2026 the run is scheduled to end on January 31, 2027.

The evening is autobiographical. It goes back to England in 1982, when Allan was a small boy whose parents ran a pub in a little village called Congerstone. He started performing magic there as a child, and the thread that runs through the show is a Fisher-Price magic set he got for Christmas at the age of five.

The stage is set as the attic above the family pub, crammed with old toys, books, photographs and boxes of magic kits. Allan opens with a monologue about losing his parents and clearing out their home, where he rediscovered his childhood toys and his first magic set. His mother, the singer Kay Kennedy, and his father, the bandleader Alan James Nicklin, appear through family photos, home videos and recordings, and he dedicates each performance to them. Along the way he talks about the magicians who inspired him and the mentor who took him on, and he walks the audience through his career up to his iMagician years.

The show is full of 1980s nostalgia, built from the songs, toys and images Allan grew up with. Even the auditorium is decorated with posters of 1980s films.

Allan has long been known for magic that uses technology, including holograms, lasers, 3D video mapping and social media. His signature routine, Digital Art, has him reach into an iPad and lift a drawing out of the screen as a real object. He performed it on Penn & Teller: Fool Us and to close the BBC's The One Show live.

The show also has bigger moments. A full-size motorcycle appears on stage, an assistant levitates and vanishes, and a stuffed toy turns into a huge moving creature that Allan rides. Close-up card magic is filmed live and projected on large screens so everyone can see it. Allan even explains how one or two of the tricks work.

The audience takes part throughout. Before the show you write your name and a favorite childhood toy on a slip of paper and drop it in a bucket; the slips come back later. Volunteers, children as well as adults, are brought on stage to work on puzzles, from jigsaws to a Rubik's Cube, and some routines use audience members' own phones.

As of October 2026, Jamie Allan leads the show, with Natalia Love as featured artist. Allan does not play every performance: at some, Harry De Cruz, the show's creative consultant, takes the lead, and Natalie Gerene alternates as featured artist. Love, a member of The Magic Circle, has toured with Allan on both sides of the Atlantic.

Allan was still a teenager when he first performed his high-tech magic on television, on This Morning in 1995. He later won The Next Great Magician on ITV, and his touring show iMagician opened at the Garrick Theatre in the West End in 2015.

Amaze started with workshop performances in St. Louis in late 2023, and then tryout runs in Nebraska, Texas and Colorado. It then played the Rhapsody Theater in Chicago over the 2023 holiday season. In summer 2024 an earlier version opened at the Marylebone Theatre in London, and an expanded version played the Criterion Theatre in the West End from October 18 to November 23, 2024. After a run in Tampa in spring 2025, the show came to New York.

The Off-Broadway production paid back its initial investment after 36 weeks and 363 performances, as announced in April 2026, and had played its 400th New York performance by May 2026.