Antonio Díaz, the magician of pop, will begin a world tour at the Bernabéu, the end date of which is unknown. What is clear is that the final show will take place at the Camp Nou. He announced this project and others this morning during an information session at the Victòria Theater in Barcelona, which he owns, with the public and guests, which he transformed into a luxurious and detailed ceremony with musical performances (Amaia) and international actors and actresses who gave brief presentations.
Among the other projects presented at this press conference, in which some international media participated, are the organization of a European theater prize whose ceremony will take place at the Victoria; a collaboration in a production by Andrew Lloyd Webber in which there will be magic, but on which he said he could not give details, and the play-off, as producer, of the Catalan musical Mar and Cel, a montage that Dagoll-Dagom transmitted to him and which, according to the magician, “will always be alive”. His current show, nothing is impossiblewith a decade of success behind him, will stop traveling and settle permanently in Barcelona where he will spend three months a year.
The event took place in the presence of the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Salvador Illa; the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni and the president of Barça, Joan Laporta. This, in a video, showed his concern because Díaz plans to start the world tour at the Bernabéu. “Don’t be a Figo,” he reproaches her jokingly. Immediately afterwards, and from the stage, he commented that a culé like Mago Pop, although he does not know when, could not close the tour in any space other than the Barcelona stadium.
Mago Pop himself described Wednesday as “a very special day.” “To get there, a lot of things had to happen. In magic, it’s difficult to attract attention and to achieve extraordinary things, you have to travel paths without leaving a trace.” He remembers his humble origins and how he dreamed of one day being the Lion King of magic, the Cirque du Soleil of magic. It was while attending a Coldplay concert that he thought that stadiums were a territory ignored by magic and it was the journalist José Ramón de la Morena who suggested he build a Bernabéu and put him in contact with the president of Real Madrid, Florentino Pérez. “Magic has never been done in stadiums. It’s about celebrating life with 60,000 or 70,000 spectators. It’s on an astronomical scale.” Díaz is forced to think of a different magic. “In the theater we don’t allow photos to be taken because we want the audience to explain to others what they saw and convince them to come. In a stadium there will be thousands of cell phones filming. I’m going to spend a lot of money. It’s the biggest investment of my life and I hope it will be the best show of my life, which will be remembered for its virtuosity and dimensions. Many of the plays I will do will never have been seen before.”
Doctor Music, a concert organizer with a tradition of organizing large stadium events, will collaborate on the project. Although journalists from South Korea, France and Italy wanted to know if he would visit their countries, Díaz could not specify the city or the date. A first schedule will be announced soon at the Bernabéu.
For the European Theater Awards, it benefits from the collaboration of Broadway World, an information site on New York theater. Díaz sought them out because he wants these prizes to be used to project European theater productions on other stages. To achieve this, he promises an awards ceremony worthy of a television spectacle. “These are rewards that break down boundaries,” he said.
Tired of television as a means of magic because, he emphasized, it lends itself to camera tricks, Díaz does not rule out that at the end of this world tour, “I will probably retire.” He is aware that he is going to try a “different adventure” from that of being in the theater every day and which makes it difficult to reconcile professional and personal life. Díaz cited David Copperfield, who praised him for his success on Broadway, and Mag Lari as the two illusionists who had the greatest impact on him in his life. He also discussed other influences such as Carl Sagan and Bobby Fischer. And he summed up his professional bets in the figure of Forrest Gump who runs “without reason to stop”.
The gala, at which the Pop Magician arrived from an aerial platform, was attended by executives of the magician’s company, collaborators of his projects and a luxurious court of celebrities. In one video, for example, the actor back to the future Christopher Lloyd appeared with his space car on the facade of the Victòria to invite the Pop Wizard on a journey to this future that he had already visited. And they took the stage, among others: Helen Hunt, Oscar-winning director and actress for Better…impossible (1997); Aaron Paul, who received several Emmy Awards for his role in Break the bad; Mira Sorvino, another Oscar winner for Powerful Aphrodite (1995); Michelle Rodríguez, regular in the saga Fast and Furious; David Henrie, actor and rally driver, among other professions; Billy Zane, who played Rose’s unwanted fiancé in Titanic; Aitana Sánchez Gijón, Paz Vega, Leonor Watling; Jon Kortajarena, Álex González… Businesswomen and models Martina Klein and Jessica Goicoechea also participated. This announcement follows the one he made in March 2023 when, on this same stage, he announced having purchased a theater in the North American city of Branson (Missouri), as a base of operations for his artistic projects in the United States. In August of the same year, he made his Broadway debut.
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