Pittsburgh native Michael Misko keeps whimsy alive with comedy-laden magic act

Editor’s note: The following story was submitted for the Shaler Area Student Section, a collaboration between TribLive and The Oracle, the student newspaper of Shaler Area High School.

Most people start their career sitting behind a screen in an office cubicle, but Pittsburgh-raised magician Michael Misko’s career started in the middle of the ocean on a cruise ship.

Misko married his college sweetheart, Sarah, and the two moved to New York City, where he was presented with a brand-new opportunity. Stephen Schwartz, a composer and lyricist for “Wicked,” had partnered with Princess Cruise Lines for a new revue show called “Magic to Do.”

“If you are theater people, you know ‘Magic to Do’ is the opening song from another show of his called ‘Pippin.’ It was this 50-minute revue show of his work that required the main character to be half magician, half musical theater performer,” Misko said. “My wife saw that and was like, ‘You should go audition for that.’ ”

Even though Misko thought his chances of getting the role were impossible and the production would not need him, he took the chance and auditioned. He earned the role of the main character, Magic Maker, which led to his real breakthrough.

“In the audition process, they said, ‘You have your own show.’ But I didn’t. They asked me, you could do the musical, and then you could do your own show, right? And I went, ‘Ummm. Yeah, sure,’ ” Misko said. “But I got to do what nobody ever really gets to do. I got to work through the ins and outs of my show in front of real people. About six months later, I had a show that they were willing to book over and over and over again. So when I left the show in 2018, I had been doing magic on ships — and have ever since.”

Misko has been doing magic since he was a boy, but little did he know where it would lead him.

“Magic started out as a hobby for me,” he said. “I was a kid when I started doing it. It was a hobby, then it became an expensive hobby, then it became a very expensive hobby, and then it became my profession.”

Regardless, his current career may not have been possible without his theater background.

Misko started theater in middle school and pursued it through college, where he got a musical theater degree at Shenandoah University in Virginia. After graduating college in 2008, he spent about 10 years touring the country performing in shows before joining “Magic to Do.”

After leaving “Magic to Do” in 2018, he was ready for the next step: his own shows. With the experience and confidence from years of being the lead performer on the cruise ship shows, Misko was able to get his name out into the world. His act, a comedy-laden magic show full of jokes, became a hit that Misko has performed for all sorts of audiences: corporate, colleges, high schools, comedy clubs and private crowds.

No matter the audience, Misko has developed a persona that he stays true to when he’s performing.

“You have to know who you are when you walk on the stage. You have to. When I walk out on stage, I play a character. Now, that character is still me, but it is a very specific and very curated version of me. My character, in a nutshell, is a lovable smart ass.”

He acknowledges some audiences may find him more “lovable” than others.

“My bread and butter audience are people my age and older,” Misko said. “The younger they get, the harder it is for me to relate to them.”

Sometimes it’s hard for the audience to relate to Misko and his show. He shared a story of being in South America and having an audience that did not speak English, something he didn’t know before he started.

“I sat there with a bunch of Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean folks that don’t speak a lick of English. I didn’t know that. No one told me that that was the demographic I was walking into. That’s not (the audience’s) fault. I have to meet my audience where they’re at. And I had to change the show on the fly.”

Similarly, the meaning of a successful show is when the crowd does not understand how something was done. A favorite trick Misko performs is a simple trick that still fools him to this day.

He takes rings from three different people in the crowd and puts them on a pencil, links them together, then takes off one of the three rings — two are still linked together. The final moment of this routine, the crowd sees the ring melt off the pencil and is in complete utter shock.

“I know how it works and it fools me,” he said.

It’s those moments of awe that magicians live for.

“That’s the best. That is the absolute best. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. You can’t fake that feeling.”

As a magician though, it can be hard to experience that amazement since he’s so familiar with the ins and outs of tricks, which is why he relishes the experience when it does happen to him.

“One of the greatest gifts you can give me is to fool me with a magic trick because I’m almost 40 years old. I’ve been doing magic since I was 6. It takes a lot to fool me. I know too much. So if you can fool me with a trick. It is a gift. The last time I was fooled by a magic trick, it was in Erie by Garrett Thomas, who was a magician from Buffalo,” he said. “I have no idea how he did it. I have only seen him do it once. I never want to see him do it again, because if I see him do it again, I’ll figure it out, and I don’t want it. I want that moment to live in my heart.”

Learning tricks that leave the audience amazed takes a lot of practice and, in some cases, can be very dangerous. One of Misko’s tricks involves him swallowing razor blades.

“I take eight double-edged stainless steel razor blades and I swallow them. I swallow a piece of thread, and then I pull the thread back out of my mouth and the eight razor blades are attached to the thread. Ta da! I rehearsed that for about a year before I put it on stage because it is super dangerous. Those are real razor blades. They are really going in my mouth. I’m not really swallowing them, but they are really going in my mouth. They could really cut me. They have cut me. That’s a really cool trick.”

Despite all the practice, it didn’t go as planned the first time he tried it on stage, which he noted was a good thing.

“Yeah, the first time I did it on stage, in front of real people, I cut myself. And it was a very good thing that I did because I had to learn what not to do, and the only way that I was gonna learn not to do it was to do what I shouldn’t have done,” Misko said. “The guy that taught it to me said to be careful. ‘If you do this, you’re gonna cut yourself.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK. And I cut myself.”

While some of his tricks may be unpleasant for him, Misko sticks to a belief that no one in his audience should be uncomfortable. If anyone gets the opportunity to come up on stage, he quietly tells them he will take care of them and they will be OK.

“There’s a famous quote in the magic world, ‘If I don’t fool you, I’m not doing my job as a magician. If I make you look foolish, I’m not doing my job as a human being,’ ” he said. “I can pull you up on stage, and we can have fun together. I can make fun with you, laugh with you, but the second I perceive that you are not okay. I want out of that situation,” Misko said.

Every now and then, he finds himself in an uncomfortable situation.

“When I go to Mexico, some groups think that some of what I do is real magic — like I have powers,” he said. “I literally had somebody come up to me and asked me to lay my hands on them. I’m like, ‘Oh, no. … That’s not me. No, no, no. Not me.’ ”

While he may not have that kind of power, Misko does believe in the power of magic and comedy.

“People are whimsy deficient these days. There’s a lot of (expletive) going on right now. Magic is an escape. You know what I’m doing isn’t real. You cannot cut a person in half and put them back together. That’s not logical. But it looks like it though, doesn’t it? The world needs more magic. Absolutely. And we need to laugh more — not take everything as seriously as we are forced to take it.”