Christmas Spectacular

Michael Boyd, an illusionist familiar to many as an Australia’s Got Talent finalist, will be familiar to many others through the various shows he has put together that combine his talents for stage magic with either other circus-style or song and dance acts, his reputation growing largely due to the impressiveness of many of his illusions.  Boyd’s 2024 Christmas Spectacular, again featuring Boyd’s illusions, incorporated a variety of Christmas-themed songs and dance acts set to such songs, along with a couple of circus acts and an appearance by Santa Claus.

This production, timed to commence at 6:30 p.m. and to finish before 8:30 p.m., is billed as family entertainment and is clearly aimed at a broad audience.  The dialogue was pitched to appeal to the youngest audience members, and they constituted close to a majority of the virtually full house I attended.  The production’s dance numbers generally took the form of modern ballet, but one dance number was a hiphop one.  The live songs, sung by The Voice finalist Prinnie Stevens, tended to be well-known Christmas-themed songs from the pop charts of the past three decades.  But the costumes and effects very much appealed to the younger children, some of whom were agog from the start.

The show worked very well at appealing to a broad audience.  Prinnie Stevens, though she perhaps included more fancy grace notes than necessary, sang every song with authority and great stagecraft, and of course Michael Boyd himself has his magic stagecraft down pat and is capable of conjuring applause from his audience whenever he feels it appropriate.  His illusions, a minority of the show, were confined to mid-sized ones, but they were impressive for all that.

The show’s dancers, some of whom have performed at the Moulin Rouge, displayed great coordination and athleticism, and the choreography suited the themes of the numbers they danced to, even of the hiphop.

One criticism I would offer is of the sound intensity, which often exceeded acceptable limits, especially in the context of the hearing health of the young and vulnerable: clearly a multigenerational tragedy of hearing loss engendered by sound engineers suffering hearing loss.  I found the sheer discomfort of such audio intensity somewhat distracting from the experience intended.  Some in the audience were a little bemused by Santa Claus’s American accent.  With that caveat, the individual acts, albeit that little tied them together as a single production, all worked well to entertain, engage, and even enthral.

John P. Harvey