Mario the Maker Magician

A workshop on the Hudson

Mario Marchese works out of Nyack, a small town on the Hudson north of New York City. When Make: magazine profiled him in October 2016, he and his wife Katie had just marked ten years since quitting their day jobs to perform full-time, which puts the start of the professional act at around 2006. The route in was not the usual one of card tricks and conjuring sets. Marchese's first obsession was automata and the mechanisms inside vintage magic apparatus, and he taught himself woodcarving and sewing so that he could build his own props. Around 2005 or 2006 he picked up a copy of Make: and discovered the Arduino microcontroller. By his own account it took him two years to get motors doing what he wanted. That is the hinge on which the whole act turns: a working magician who decided to become the engineer of his own apparatus rather than buy it.

The family side is not incidental. Marchese restored a 1971 Volkswagen bus, known online as the little blue bus, and used it as a touring vehicle for the family, documenting the trips on YouTube. Reviews from Edinburgh in 2025 still note Katie producing and the couple's two children taking part in the show. The business has always been a household one.

Marcel, Mr Lamp and the Card Machine

The robots are the signature. The first was Marcel the Mechanical Monkey, which Marchese describes as his first autonomous robot built to assist with a trick. Others followed: Mr Lamp, Mr Clock and a card machine that shakes its rear. On stage, according to a review from the 2025 Fringe, the most memorable is a robot built from a tomato soup can that comes to life whenever Mario is not looking. The props are made from cardboard, recycled objects, simple electronics and 3D printing, and they are designed to fail on cue: things burst, flip, fall, twist and explode.

That approach has become a teaching practice. His book, The Maker Magician's Handbook, sets out to show a reader how to build a whole magic show from things around the house, and covers 3D design, 3D printing and programming. He has produced a chomper-bot kit with Make: and an Arduino kit, and lectured at Magic Live, Penguin and the Magic Castle. Trade recognition followed. The International Brotherhood of Magicians gave him a Presidential Honor in 2021, the same year the Kids' Entertainer Fest inducted him into its hall of fame.

The television and touring credits are the ones the posters lead with. He has appeared on Sesame Street, Universal Kids and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and he toured live with David Blaine, whose line that Marchese is the best kids' magician in the world has appeared on every listing since.

London, Adelaide, Edinburgh

The international breakthrough came in the mid-2020s, and it came through festivals. At the 2024 Adelaide Fringe the show won Best Kids and Family Show. That summer it ran at Underbelly Boulevard in Soho from 15 June to 4 August 2024, a 60-minute show that critics treated as more than children's entertainment. London Theatre 1 gave it five stars on 22 June 2024, describing a performer who combines the artistry of Derren Brown and Tommy Cooper with manic energy, and noting how Marchese gets a room of children shouting the names of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. The Stage followed on 1 July 2024 with five stars from Oliver Jones, who called it a sugar rush of a show for audiences of all ages with substance as well as style. The London season earned an Offies nomination in 2024 for performance in theatre for young audiences.

Edinburgh in August 2025 repeated the pattern. At the Udderbelly in George Square, Stage Door Joe gave five stars on 6 August 2025 and argued that the tricks are more sophisticated than the usual children's fare and that adults enjoy them as much. Entertainment Now, reviewing a 10.30am performance on 17 August 2025, also gave five stars, called the hour fantastically silly and imaginative, and singled out a trick in which the magic happens in a child's own hands, plus a passage about teachers and the role models, Warhol among them, who shaped his work. Edinburgh Festivals for Kids summed him up as part magician, part clown and part chaos conductor.

Off-Broadway to the Opera House

Back in New York, the show played the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street in a run the theatre says sold out, and a version billed as Mario the Maker Magician 2.0 played Midtown West, where Show-Score audiences rated it 94 per cent across 24 reviews before it closed. The New Victory has booked it again for 17 April to 9 May 2027, with Katie Rosa Marchese directing and producing alongside Chris Cox, lighting by Adam Blumenthal and animation by Mark Palansky. Auckland Live's listing notes a recent appearance at the Sydney Opera House, and a Boston booking at the Roberts Studio Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion has already been and gone.

The most recent developments are in the southern hemisphere. Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon covered him on 4 September 2026, fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe and about to bring the show to Auckland's We The Young festival. The dates are 25 to 27 September 2026 at the Herald Theatre in the Aotea Centre, five performances in all, with tickets from NZ$20 to NZ$92 and a recommended age of five and up. Either side of Auckland sits an Australian run: The Round in Nunawading on 20 September, The Pavilion in Sutherland on 30 September and 1 October, The Q in Queanbeyan on 3 and 4 October, The Art House in Wyong on 6 and 7 October and NAFA in Townsville from 9 to 11 October. Then home: the Bank Street Fall Fair in New York on 18 October, the Ferst Center at Georgia Tech on 13 and 14 November, two nights at Mohonk Mountain House in late December, Virginia Tech on 31 January 2027 and George Mason University on 20 February 2027, before the New Victory return.

What the act is for

Strip away the noise and the show has a plain argument. Marchese uses the tricks to tell stories about artists, inventors and scientists, and repeats one instruction to the room: do what you love, use what you have, and have fun. The Fringe reviewers of 2025 noted a segment about the influence of teachers and a closing message about self-belief, and London critics in 2024 remarked on how emotional the last few minutes can get after an hour of slapstick. The props being homemade is the point rather than a budget constraint. A child watching a soup can walk across a table is being told that the can, the cardboard and the cheap microcontroller are enough to start with.

That is also why the act has aged well into a family business. The credits on the 2027 New Victory run list Mario and Katie Marchese as co-writers and Katie as director and producer. The two children have been on stage at the Fringe. What began as one man carving his own props in a Nyack workshop is now a company of four that tours in a van, and the show on stage is more or less an honest account of how it was built.