A week ago (June 19) my husband and I went to Wisconsin Dells, or “The Dells” as they are referred to by most Wisconsinites. We had some Dells Season Opener coupon books to use up before July, so we decided to go for a couple of days. One of the things in the coupon book is the Jeremy Allen’s Grand Illusions. I believe it was $6 per person for general admission tickets.
We decided to go see it Thursday night and we called a few hours before the show and learned the general admission tickets were sold out so we had to upgrade $10 per ticket to get in. So we upgraded the tickets. I crossed my fingers that the show would be good since we were spending more on it than originally planned.
We went to dinner and then headed to the show, which is in a little mini-mall right by Timber Falls (if you are familiar with the area). That immediately gave me a bad feeling, but I told myself not to make judgments yet. We went to the Will Call table to pick up our tickets. Based on the size of the inside, I wasn’t feeling any better about things yet. We also noticed it was pretty cold in the building, and learned from the Will Call girl that it doesn’t get any warmer in the “theater”. We went back out to our car to get some jackets, which actually came more in handy than we thought. I’ll get to that later…
10 minutes later we were in our seats, which were fold up chairs with burlap over them. Classy. We were in the second row, two seats away from the stage on the left side. The stage has a “catwalk” to the middle of the room, where some of the illusions are performed. The stage was set up to look outdoorsy and there was the sound of crickets, which annoyed my husband. There was also top 40 music playing, which was weird along with the cricket sound. The music seemed rather loud at times, and this is coming from a young woman who likes her music loud! A bird flew out from backstage at one point and went into the rafters. We thought this might be part of the intro to the show, but no. It took awhile for the show to actually start.
When the show did start, some dancers wearing afro wigs and robes that looked like they were made out of quilts. They did some dancing and drum-beating and then started messing with a wood box. They opened it to show us it was empty, closed it, opened it again and out came a bunch of birds and Jeremy Allen. The birds flew into the rafters and stayed there for the rest of the show.
Next he had an assistant get into a box standing up and made it look like he was stretching her out, then he performed some levitating tricks with a piece of paper and a stool. The stool was kind of impressive since he had it go into the audience a bit. There was a lot of him and his assistant disappearing and reappearing in other places. I guess I prefer those illusions since I usually can’t figure out exactly how it is done.
He got some kids up on stage and did a marshmallow trick with them and then scared them by having an assistant in a tiger costume come out of a tent. That was sort of amusing. Otherwise, it was honestly difficult to concentrate on the show since the birds in the rafters kept moving around. Some of them were walking around near our feet. Others were up in the rafters above us, and eventually they started pooping, as birds do. At that point, I was glad that had my coat on. I was able to put the hood up to defend myself from possible bird poop in my hair. Luckily, I didn’t get pooped on, but it still distracted me from enjoying the show.
On some nights, they have tigers in the show. I don’t know that I would feel safe going to one of the shows with the tigers in it, to be honest. Seeing the way they handled the birds…
All in all, it wasn’t a terrible show. It wasn’t a great show either. I would have felt better about it if we hadn’t spent more just to get in. I would recommend this more for families with young children that might get more of a kick out of it. I also recommend that you watch out for bird poop!
Words from Wiza 