Lance Burton was born in Columbia, Kentucky, in 1960, but it was Louisville where he grew up, learned his craft, and became close friends with the boy who would grow up to be fellow magician Mac King. At five years old, watching a magician named Harry Collins pull silver dollars out of the air at a Christmas party, Burton was hooked. That fascination carried him from the Louisville Magic Club to Johnny Carson’s couch to a Las Vegas theater built specifically for his show.
Burton went on to perform more than 15,000 shows in Las Vegas for over five million people before retiring in 2010, becoming one of the most successful magicians in American history. He credits the thousand small performances he gave as a Louisville teenager, not raw talent, with making that career possible.
A Louisville Childhood and a Chance Encounter with Magic
Burton’s family had moved to Louisville’s Shively neighborhood from Adair County so his father could find steady work, eventually rising to chief mechanic at Levy’s Building Supply. At age five, Burton attended a Christmas party at the factory where his mother worked and watched magician Harry Collins perform the Miser’s Dream, pulling silver dollars from the air and from Burton’s own ears. A neighbor soon gave him a beginner’s magic book, and Burton was charging neighborhood kids a nickel a show within weeks.
A Mentor and the Louisville Magic Club
Collins noticed the boy’s persistence and became his mentor throughout his teenage years, teaching him the fundamentals of sleight of hand, while a second influence, magician Channing Pollock, later shaped Burton’s approach to card manipulation and his use of live doves onstage.
It was also through Louisville’s magic scene, at the local Louisville Magic Club, that Burton met a fellow teenager named Mac King, beginning a friendship that has lasted more than fifty years. King would go on to headline his own long-running Las Vegas show, and the two have stayed close collaborators and friends ever since their days as Louisville teenagers driving across town to see each other perform.
“We met at the Louisville Magic Club. We both grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and they have a magic club that still meets once a month. And that’s where I met Mac.”
— Lance Burton, on meeting fellow magician Mac King
A Thousand Shows Before Carson
In 1977, as a teenager, Burton won his first magic competition, and by 1980 he had earned a Gold Medal of Excellence from the International Brotherhood of Magicians. He soon moved to Southern California and, within a week, was booked on The Tonight Show, where Johnny Carson was so impressed in rehearsal that he let Burton perform an unprecedented twelve-minute routine on October 28, 1981.
Burton has said the overnight success was an illusion of its own: by his own count, he had already performed his signature act roughly a thousand times in front of live audiences by the night of that broadcast. He would return to The Tonight Show ten more times during Carson’s tenure and another ten times after Jay Leno took over as host, along with appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.
Advice Rooted in Louisville Stages
“You have to get up in front of people and do your magic. You have to perform in front of strangers. I say it takes approximately a thousand performances in order to create a professional act.”
— Lance Burton, describing the advice he gives young magicians
Burton has spent more than two decades passing that lesson on as the sponsor of the Lance Burton Teen Seminar, a three-day workshop for magicians between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, held each year at the International Brotherhood of Magicians convention. He teaches alongside fellow professionals Jeff McBride and Larry Hass, running workshops, classes, and guest lectures for teenagers just starting out, much as Harry Collins once did for him in Louisville.
Three Jobs in Thirty Years
Unlike most touring performers, Burton built his career almost entirely in Las Vegas residencies. He spent nine years in the Folies Bergère show at the Tropicana, five years at his own show at the Hacienda Hotel, and fourteen years at the Monte Carlo Resort, where the 1,274-seat Lance Burton Theater was built to his specifications at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars. In 1982 he also won the Grand Prix at the international FISM magic competition in Switzerland, becoming the youngest performer and first American to do so.
Signature Illusions
Burton built his reputation on large-scale illusions rather than close-up card tricks. In a 1999 television special filmed at Buffalo Bill’s in Primm, Nevada, he appeared to narrowly escape the path of the Desperado roller coaster, one of the fastest in the country, missing it by a tenth of a second before turning to the camera and deadpanning, “That was stupid. That was really stupid.” In 2004, marking his tenth anniversary at the Monte Carlo, he introduced an illusion called the Solid Gold Lady, built using ten million dollars in real gold.
He was married briefly to fellow magician Melinda Saxe in 1993, and the couple divorced the following year. Twice named Magician of the Year by the Academy of Magical Arts, in 1985 and 1991, Burton also received the Academy’s Masters Fellowship in 2010, one of the highest honors in American magic.
Retirement on the Family Farm
Burton’s final Las Vegas show came on September 4, 2010. He eventually moved back to Kentucky, building a home on his grandfather’s farm in Adair County, the same land his own father had grown up on decades earlier. He continues to perform occasional shows around the country with old friends, sponsors young magicians, and spends much of his time on animal rescue, fostering cats between tours.
“I did my career backwards. Most entertainers spend the first 20 years traveling around, and then they get the residency in Las Vegas. I only really had three jobs in my entire career.”
— Lance Burton, reflecting on his unusual career path
Burton has stayed connected to the next generation of performers as well, including Mat Franco, who met Burton as a twelve-year-old fan waiting at the stage door and later became a Las Vegas headliner in his own right. Decades after leaving the Louisville Magic Club, Burton still credits the city’s small community of amateur magicians, and the mentor he met there as a boy, with teaching him the fundamentals of an art form he would go on to reshape.