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A good magic show peddles the illusion that anything is possible. A great one proves it.
For the past six years, America’s Got Talent champion Shin Lim has astounded audiences with some of the most dizzying displays of card magic ever seen in a live setting. His Limitless residency at the Mirage moved to the Palazzo Theater in 2024 and remains at the top of the to-do list for magic enthusiasts. Fully fleshed out with a three-act structure depicting Lim’s life, Limitless champions perseverance.
But it wouldn’t be as grand without its music. Lim, a former pianist, uses scores throughout each act, heightening the drama and dexterity of his tricks. He spoke with the Weekly on how music and new mentalists have refreshed the show and more.
I’m impressed with the way you’ve choreographed your tricks to music. How integral is music to the early stages of perfecting a trick?
For creation, I have almost like a set list of music that I really like and that I really want to perform to. When I’m creating an act, I kind of have a feel for it, about whether it’s gonna match, whether it’s the right vibe. Then I match the trick to the song. Sometimes it does go the other way around though. Sometimes I would hear a song and that would inspire me to create something just for that song. That one’s a little bit harder because magic is linear in a sense of, there’s a beginning, middle and end to the storyline of each trick. It has to be sequential. … But it’s doable. I do it a lot.
You worked film scores into your AGT auditions, too. Who are your favorite composers?
Hans Zimmer, for sure. I’m his biggest fan. I grew up watching a lot of movies when I was younger. I was home-schooled, and my mom kind of instinctually saw that I was artistic, and she literally was like, “Hey, I’m gonna focus on your older and younger brother, teaching them, and I’m gonna let you do whatever you want.” So she let me just not even study, which was pretty great for my younger years. One of the things about movies that I really loved was the music in them, and one of the musicians in movies was Hans Zimmer, and I really admire his genius.
As an ex-musician, is it gratifying to still be able to connect music to your magic?
Of course, yes. People always say, “Oh, you must feel so bad that you’re not doing music anymore,” but I’m actually the music supervisor for the show. Every single piece of music in there, I either picked or I had a composer create the song just for it. I would tell them, hey, make it like this, or crescendo here, decrescendo here. I would say 50% of the show is original, and then the other half is Hans Zimmer, M83 … the Tron: Legacy soundtrack. There’s a ton.
Does having a permanent residency give you the freedom to try out new material?
Absolutely. Right after AGT, I did a North American tour and as fun as that was, it was pretty grueling. You don’t really get to see the cities that you go to. It’s mainly just bus, hotel and then theater. You’re spending all that time just rehearsing and teching. You don’t have a chance to even try something new, because if you do, the crew is gonna freak out. Whereas for the residency, because the crew is so familiar with the stage, everything’s all the same.
Almost every day I make a change, whether it’s how I’m speaking or the magic itself. Recently, we’ve been having a big change of mentalists ... and then that actually changes the entire vibe of the show. You can actually feel the energy of the show completely changes from one type of thing, where there’s more comedy, to now with The Clairvoyants and more drama. I never expected that to happen. I thought the show was always going to be the same type of energy, but actually it changes with the mentalist. It’s very cool.
How has it been working with The Clairvoyants’ Thommy and Amélie? They’re very different from your eccentric buddy Colin Cloud.
Yeah, they are. They’re so professional. They’re so talented. Their third act, the one where Amélie’s on the swing, and Thommy is able to take any object and she just knows the expiration date, how many pieces of gum that are inside, or tissue paper, that blows my mind. I know a lot of magic. I also know a lot of mentalism ... and the crew does, too. [But] every night, we’re just like, How do they do it?It’s actually quite refreshing to have that feeling, because as a magician you kind of know everything, so it can get ... not stale, but something similar to that.
Will The Clairvoyants be permanent? Or will new acts join the show?
I think they’re gonna be here to stay. We’ve been having so many mentalists now rotate, and they’ve all been great. We’ve had Spidey, we’ve had Peter Antoniou, and then we’re gonna have Stuart MacLeod, who’s a great comedian and a host. We’re gonna pretty much find our top three that we really like. And I know The Clairvoyants are already in there. I like to change the show up a lot. But once I find the two or three that I really like, I’m gonna keep them in the long run.
Has being based here allowed you to connect more with Vegas’ magic community?
Yeah, it’s huge. I had no idea how big the magic community was in Vegas until I started living here.This is, like, magic mecca. And it’s great because magicians from LA and New York will always come and visit Vegas anyway. So, we always have friends just coming in and out. It’s pretty great. I really love this city. It’s really growing on me. When the pandemic died down, and I could actually go out and eat food at restaurants and stuff, I was like, this place is pretty cool. I moved to Henderson in 2020, so in 2019 I was still doing the residency at the Mirage, but I was living in LA, so I would drive every weekend to Vegas.
What are your favorite restaurants, on and off the Strip?
I promise you, I am not paid by Venetian to say this, but I eat at the Venetian every day before the show [laughs]. They have such an array of restaurants, and I can compare it to the Mirage, because I used to do the same at the Mirage. Off-Strip, I still Postmates a lot … but I do like going to Chinatown. 888 Japanese BBQ is so good. For dessert, I like Mango Mango. It’s cool because they have a lot of Southeast Asian types of cuisine for mango desserts. And it’s nostalgic, because I grew up in Singapore for my early childhood, and some of the desserts they sell there, it’s what I ate when I was in Singapore.
I don’t think I’ve seen a magic show that inspired me as much as yours. Who inspires you?
My older brother. He’s the one who taught me my first magic trick. He only knew one trick at that time, but I always looked up to him. He was the coolest guy in high school. He broke all the records in our swim team. I was also a swimmer on that swim team. I was not as good at all. (Laughs.) But I always looked up to him so much, and in high school, he had this kind of vigor ... he just had this drive. It would just shine out of him like anything was possible. I think that inspired me to learn from him and I got a lot out of it. It’s something that I’ve always just kept with me all throughout.
It’s almost like a mental game of pushing through. You’re almost hypnotizing your own brain to do something that you know might not even be possible. I noticed he did this before a big swim competition. They call it psyching themselves for the swim meet. Almost every day in your brain, you visualize yourself swimming really, really fast and beating your time. It’s almost like a daily practice where you kind of tell your brain. And I could see him doing that. I now do the same thing. I did it for AGT. I did it for Penn & Teller: Fool Us. I did it for the show when I was opening. I’m almost like, psyching myself and getting my brain ready for this type of pressure.
SHIN LIM: LIMITLESS Wednesday-Sunday, 7:30 p.m. (& Saturday, 4:30 p.m.), $59-$261. Palazzo Theatre, ticketmaster.com.
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