Illusionist Anthony Street

A rope trick at a country carnival

Street grew up in rural Victoria, around motorbikes and open ground rather than theatres. He has told the same origin story to several interviewers during 2025: he was eight years old at a local carnival when a magician performed a rope trick in front of him, and the thing refused to leave his head. His phrasing in the Waikato Independent was flat and unembroidered — that trick stuck with him.

What makes the anecdote more than colour is that the rope trick is now in the show. Street rebuilt it into the current touring set as a piece of autobiography rather than as a warm-up item, which is a structural choice as much as a sentimental one: it gives the evening a spine that most magic bills do not have.

The other half of his childhood was Irish dance, which he took up as a teenager and which, for a while, won. Magic went into the background for the better part of a decade while he made a living with his feet.

Eight years in hard shoes

Street joined an Australian Irish dance company and, at nineteen, left on what was advertised as a five-month tour. It turned into an eight-year career. He took a residency in Dublin with Dance of Desire and worked through France and Germany before being cast as a principal dancer in Michael Flatley's Lord of the Dance, performing the lead role Flatley originally created for himself.

That period explains a great deal about how he behaves on stage now. Illusion is a discipline in which most practitioners are trained in secrets and improvise the body language; Street arrived with the opposite inheritance. He had been drilled for years in timing, in holding a line, in making an entrance land on a downbeat. The misdirection came later.

It also gave him a production grammar. A dancer who has worked inside a Flatley show has seen how a touring machine is assembled — the lighting cues, the costume changes, the way a cast is rotated through a six-month run — and that knowledge is what he drew on when he decided to build something of his own.

Celtic Illusion, and the New York run that never opened

Street founded Celtic Illusion in November 2011 after months of preparation, putting Irish dance and grand illusion into the same ninety minutes. The cast drew on performers from both Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. The score was commissioned work: Angela Little, who had worked on Baz Luhrmann's Australia, and Steve Skinner, an arranger with credits on Rent and sessions with Celine Dion and Stevie Wonder, with additional composition from Michael Londra, a former Riverdance lead on Broadway.

The show did what hybrid productions rarely manage — it travelled. Celtic Illusion played sold-out houses across Australia, Canada and the United States over the following decade, and the press shorthand that attached itself to it was the Boston Globe's: Riverdance meets David Copperfield.

The one booking that did not happen was the significant one. Celtic Illusion was announced for New World Stages off-Broadway, with performances from 30 June 2022, an opening night of 10 July and a closing date of 11 September. On 17 June 2022 the run was cancelled before the first preview, with producer Jeff Parry saying only that the pieces of the puzzle were not aligning. No reason beyond that was given publicly, and the New York engagement has not been rescheduled.

Celtic Illusion remains in circulation as a touring title, and Street has brought other large-scale dance productions, including Ballroom Blitz, through the same circuit.

Going out alone

Somewhere after the New York collapse, the emphasis shifted. Street began touring under his own name with a show billed variously as Illusionist Anthony Street and Magic & Illusion Spectacular — smaller, cheaper to move, and built around him rather than around a company of dancers.

He has been explicit about why. Speaking to the Otago Daily Times ahead of a Regent Theatre date in Dunedin, he said it was no longer just about grand-scale illusions, that it was about connection, and about close-up moments that feel more impossible than the big boxes do. That is a defensible artistic position and also a sound commercial one for a solo performer working regional theatres.

New Zealand has become his most reliable territory. He has toured there since 2016 and calls it a second home. The 2025 run was twenty-two dates between 6 July and 10 August, taking in Hamilton's Clarence Street Theatre on 9 July, the Turner Centre at Kerikeri on 13 July, Forum North in Whangārei on 14 July — his first Northland shows — and continuing through Rotorua, Whanganui, Nelson, Christchurch and Invercargill. Australian dates have run alongside, including the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre at Penrith on 17 January 2025.

Where things stand, October 2026

The current production is The Illusion Effect, a new touring show Street created and performs. His own material describes it as grand illusions, mind reading and close-up sleight of hand, combining classic stagecraft with modern production, and pitched at families rather than at enthusiasts — first-time believers through to sceptics, as the billing has it.

The nearest confirmed date is a matinee at Canberra Theatre on Saturday 31 October 2026 at 2pm, listed at roughly one hour fifty minutes straight through with no interval. That is a notably longer sit than the solo shows of early 2025, which Penrith listed at about an hour; the running time suggests The Illusion Effect is a rebuild rather than a retitling, carrying more stage apparatus than the stripped-down tour it follows.

Beyond that Canberra matinee the published schedule is thin, with no broad block of dates currently on general sale. Street's booking pattern over the past two years has been to announce territory by territory — an Australian regional swing, then a New Zealand run the following winter — rather than to drop a full year at once.

The craft argument

Street is unusually candid about what he thinks the job is. Anyone can learn a trick, he told the Northern Advocate; it is the delivery and the performance that count. He also admitted that being asked to do magic on request makes him extremely uncomfortable, which is a telling remark from someone whose stage work leans heavily on audience volunteers — the control he wants is over the frame, not over the people.

His own nomination for the best thing he does is small rather than large: he borrows three wedding rings from the audience and makes them vanish, and says it is the trick people talk about for months afterwards. A reviewer who saw the 2025 tour independently reached the same conclusion, calling the three-rings routine the standout of the night.

That same review, published on 27 July 2025, was warm but not uncritical. The writer found Street personable and funny and most of the routines clever, while wondering whether the very relaxed delivery meant the show was not quite as magical as it could be — watchable, particularly for children, but soft-edged. It is a fair diagnosis of the trade-off a performer makes when he decides that connection matters more than awe.