Penn & Teller live, Wednesday, November 5, 2026, Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, Cerritos, CA. Attended by Gregory and Jackie.
The night in brief
The preshow opens with Penn Jillette on Bass and Mike Jones, Penn & Teller’s musical director, playing piano in the room in before the lights go down. Penn walks out about 15 minutes before showtime to get ready leaving Mike solo on piano for the rest of the pre-show. The actual show runs roughly ninety minutes, straight through, with Teller silent the entire night (as always) and Penn doing all of the talking.
It’s a show built out of the audience. Nearly every bit pulls volunteers out of the seats — One person counting money and guessing jelly beans, another thinking of a card, a volunteer with a Rubik’s cube, a woman buying a T-shirt with her own credit card, then watching that same card vanish and turn up in a trash can — and by the end of the night Penn has half the room standing up to prove a point about stooges. The through-line, if there is one, is Penn’s favorite argument: this isn’t illusion, it’s magic, done live, under the same laws of physics as everything else — and entropy always wins, except when it doesn’t.
The show, in order
A miracle. We begin the act looking for a young disciple from the audience. For you see, Teller has the power of the polyester and we need a prophet to go and preach the good news. Once a young girl is selected from the audience, she spends the next few minutes assisting Teller in cutting, tying, and restoring a long strip of synthetic fabric.
The wisdom of the crowd. The opener is a jelly-bean jar and a statistics lesson. Penn explains the “wisdom of crowds” — ask a roomful of people to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar and nobody gets it right, but average all the guesses and you land almost dead on. A volunteers picks four slips from a bowl and holds them up. The audience does the math on their phones, and the averaged guess comes out to 2,053. “Oh man, this blows my mind every night.”
A trick bought on the internet. Penn reads aloud from the instructions for a trick they bought online, by Spanish magician Woody Aragón — translating the Spanish as he goes, badly and on purpose. It’s a running joke about how magic works as an art form: buy the trick, get the props, get the secret, and the rights to perform it.
Cirque du Soleil, and dreams. Penn talks about asking their Vegas neighbors at Cirque du Soleil what their shows are about. The answer: “Dreams.” “Live your dreams.” Penn’s answer is his recurring nightmare — opening his high school locker, naked, teeth falling out. Then the audience writes down their own dreams on slips of paper, and the room erupts into a paper-ball fight, both sides throwing dreams at each other.
A card trick, and a lecture. A young boy thinks of a card, writes it on Teller’s forehead, and Teller “reads” it — and then Penn stops to draw the line that defines the act: “We’re not doing special effects… We are doing magic tricks live in this theater for you right now.” From there he pivots to the second law of thermodynamics — entropy, chaos, the universe falling apart — and hands a guest a Rubik’s cube. Penn admits he has no idea how to solve one; our volunteer, “perfect Mother Nature,” destroys everything she touches. The cube solves itself anyway. “Mother nature is not nurturing. Mother nature is destruction. Mother nature is chaos.”
Improvisation. The middle of the show is built from whatever the room gives them: it’s November 5th, so Penn finds the November birthdays, then finds the coincidences — people dressed in all black, people from Downey, Nirvana fans — while Jonesy improvises on piano (“Birthday” by the Beatles, “Back in Black,” “California Dreamin'”). Then the balloon bit: 49 balloons in the audience plus three on stage make a full deck of 52, each balloon holding a card, popped on the count of four to find the two of spades, the five of clubs, and the Jack of Diamonds. They’re exactly where Penn wanted them to be, the odds of that happing here, tonight? “100%, it’s a trick!”
Eight minutes of silence. It is a real treat to watch a Teller solo trick. He invites a couple up on stage… the woman draws an image of the man’s face onto a sheet of glass. Teller takes that glass, puts it into a plastic bag and breaks it. He then takes the shattered glass pieces, rolls them out in tray, and with some classic smoke and mirrors, seemingly restores the pane of glass and hands it back to the couple to keep as a souvenir.
The commercial. Penn refuses to stop the show for a commercial — and then does exactly that, selling T-shirts. A woman from the audience, need a 2XL shirt and pays with her own credit card, which Penn then makes vanish in a borrowed-object routine. The card turns up inside a hamburger container, wrapped in rubber bands, nested inside three trash cans. Asked why the trash can is locked shut, Penn answers: “Raccoons!”
“We do not ever use stooges.” The last long stretch is Penn’s famous defense, delivered straight to the skeptics in the room: every magic audience worries about three things — palming, mirrors, and stooges. He stands up the birthday people, the balloon people, and everyone else who was involved in the show that evening. Then he does the math: “You cannot run a successful small business with 4.5% of your clientele on payroll.” Then he asks who still thinks a stooge was used, and invites all of them up on stage. And sure, some of these people could also be stooges, but I brought up everyone who raised their hand so at least some of them must not be. “We are going to attempt to perform a magic trick surrounded by every pain in the ass in the audience.” At this point he asks a woman in the front row to pick the least likely plant among them, and does the finale surrounded by them: darts thrown at books of the Bible, rock-paper-scissors, a dice roll to chapter 8, a verse chosen by a young girl on stage — “If any man profess to be full of joy, let him sing songs” It’s exactly the verse written on a banner, inside an envelope, inside another envelope, that was out in the lobby to be signed by the audience members before the show!
The closer. After thanking the local crew, Penn brings it back to entropy: you have to do magic right, but you also have to watch magic right. He reveres the footage of the earlier entropy trick to show us how it’s really done.
Final Thougts
I’ve watched Penn & Teller on television for years, but seeing the act live makes something obvious that television can’t quite capture: the audience isn’t watching the show. The audience is the show.
The people sitting around us became prophets, statisticians, card pickers, Rubik’s-cube destroyers, birthday coincidences, skeptics, and pains in the ass standing onstage trying to catch two professional magicians cheating.
And Penn & Teller somehow controlled the chaos without ever making it feel controlled.
That’s probably why Jackie and I walked out still talking about it. You know it’s a trick. They tell you it’s a trick. Sometimes they even show you the trick.
And you’re still left wondering how the hell they did it.
That’s magic.