After performing Off-Broadway, on Norwegian and Disney Cruise lines, at Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City and other high-profile venues nationwide, magician Jason Bishop, a former Lehigh Valley resident, is coming back to open a home base for his show.

Straight Up Magic, a performance theater that will offer magic shows each weekend night, is set to open Nov. 6 inside Whitehall Mall along MacArthur Road in the space that originally held the mall’s Plaza Movie Theater.

Straight Up Magic will be an intimate 100-seat theater, with chandeliers and red curtains, concessions, a red carpet area designed for photos and more, according to Bishop, who grew up in Emmaus, attended Salisbury Township School District schools and lives in Fleetwood, Berks County.

Not only will “every seat feel close to the magic,” but ”the illusions won’t only stay on stage, they’ll cross into the audience and unfold right before your eyes,” according to the venue website, www.jasonbishopmagic.com. Parking is free in the mall lot.

Shows are 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays, through Jan. 2, 2027.

Tickets are $45-$75, with limited options whereby audience members can be part of the show.

The theater will expand to offer other magicians and perhaps comedy shows, says Bishop.

Straight Up Magic will offer “big illusions, and our dog Gizmo and people disappear and levitate and all that stuff,” Bishop says.

“We’ll bring in guest entertainers who have performed on places like ‘America’s Got Talent’ and ‘The Voice’ and all of the late-night shows.

“In my sort of career, a lot of these people just become your friends. You work with them on cruise ships or hotels or wherever, corporate events, and you just become friendly with them. We’re in good proximity to Philadelphia and New York, so we can get that kind of talent in pretty easily.

“On certain nights or after our show, like, say a 9:30 show, could be a comic or a different magician from New York City.

“It’s a really unique offering that way in the Lehigh Valley, I think.”

Bishop previously for more than a year performed at a similar venue at Camelback Resort in the Poconos. He said the clientele was “super seasonal,” leaving him frustrated the rest of the year.

Bishop decided to move his home base closer to home.

“I’ve traveled the world and did a lot of stuff for the show and decided we want to just be home a lot more often and set up something here,” says Bishop.

A lesson he learned from the Poconos “was that location does matter,” he says. “Mostly easy directions. That’s a big thing that that works. And so we were looking around.

“We talked with the Whitehall Mall, which was just purchased by Mark Gold Mishram Group, and they have a vision. I mean, he is a visionary with this stuff, and he has this great place called The Grove [at Wesley Chapel] in [Tampa Bay] Florida, and it’s just fantastic.”

The Grove at Wesley Chapel is a 472,000-square-foot open-air retail, dining and entertainment destination along I-75 in the Tampa Bay area.

“When we sat down with Mark and his guys … and understood their vision and what they wanted to do, it really was a fit. It just fit.

“Mark was super excited about what we were doing. That’s his jam: to have that kind of entertainment in there and offer something beyond retail.”

“The full gambit”

The show will be largely the same as the one Bishop takes on the road nationally and internationally, he says:

“It’s everything. It’s big illusions: people vanish and appear and levitate, and the dog disappears, things like that.

“We also have a big television screen, and we’ll do some close-up magic for a few people, and that gets projected onto the big screen. So it’s these various stages of magic, even a little bit of mind-reading.

“It’s the full gambit, not just one particular thing. It’s not like all little card tricks or all just big illusions. It’s the entire range of magic, and that definitely makes us unique.”

The show will incorporate music and comedy, Bishop says.

“The show is just way funnier than people expect,” he says. “Like, I work a lot of places and very often hear, like, ‘Oh, you’re funnier than the comedian last night,’ or ‘You should be a stand-up,’ or ‘You don’t have to do magic, just do comedy.’

“We’ve been really fortunate, too, that people really find the show very funny that way. That helps to pace the magic a little better and make it more palatable, too, instead of just being dramatic and serious the whole time or anything.

“The concept is almost like a comedy club, but for magic. But it can also be comedy, as well.”

The show will continuously be modified, Bishop says.

“It’ll have material that we’ve done on television, and then over the course of the year … new pieces will come in and go out. The show always evolves. If you came back two, three years later, you would see a lot of different material that you didn’t see the first time.”

Bishop, born in Newark, N.J., at age seven became a foster child placed in numerous homes in eastern Pennsylvania. In the Lehigh Valley, he says, he found friends and support for his love of magic.

As a teen, he worked at Dorney Park and Wildwater Kingdom, South Whitehall Township, and Superior Restaurant, Emmaus. He says Salisbury High School dramatic arts teacher Richard Marsico mentored him and helped develop his stage skills. He moved again and in 1996 graduated from Fleetwood Area High School.

Bishop has had extended engagements on Broadway at New York’s New Victory Theater, Times Square, 2016 and 2017. “It was big and had celebrities and stuff come out to that, and some of them get turned away because they were sold out,” he says.

He appeared on NBC-TV’s “Today” show, where he made his pet dog Gizmo disappear.

Coming home

In recent years, he says he has done 200 shows annually, and “we’ve been performing in L.A. [at The Magic Castle social club] and met some like Christian Bale or Alan Ritchson, who plays Reacher on the big [Amazon Prime TV] show, ‘Reacher.’

“We were the first magicians on a cruise ship in North America after COVID, I think that was a Celebrity Edge. We had a residency in Dallas, Fort Worth, Texas, for about a month at the Gaylord Texan, which is, I think, the biggest non-casino hotel in the country. … It started as two months, and then we extended, and so we just lived in Texas for five months.”

He says he also performed in China; “That was a highlight.”

There’s something about coming home, where his best friends still live, and opening a new venue, he says.

“This area brings in quality things, and I think there’s a growing population here, and people don’t necessarily want to go to New York,” says Bishop. “I just did [a show in] New York last night. We just had a reviewer come out from some newspaper there, and he loved the show.

“It is a New York-quality show at not-New-York prices, and you don’t have to drive to New York to see it. I think some people will be a little surprised at the level of quality of the show. I mean, so that’s a big thing,” Bishop says.