Mario Marchesephoto: Katie Rosa Marchese.
Mario may be a maker ‘gician but his real name is Mario Marchese. In his early 40s, Marchese is compact and wiry, with a boyishly handsome, elastic-featured face and a thick shock of dark, well-groomed hair perpetually on the verge of going rogue. Onstage, wearing a white shirt, skinny tie, and ripped black jeans, he is hyper-enthusiastic, hyper-excitable, and hyper-expressive. Offstage, he’s much the same, including the outfit, only a few degrees less hyper. I went to visit him the other day in Nyack, an hour or so outside the city, where he lives with his wife Katie, who is also his producer, publicist, tour manager, and unofficial life coach, and their 13-year-old daughter Gigi and 11-year-old son Bear. The kids have spent much of their childhood on the road, getting home-schooled and helping help out at shows. Though the image of the family criss-crossing the country in a 1971 light blue VW bus has an idyllic neo-Partridge Family vibe, those days may be coming to an end. “When they were toddlers, we could just throw them in car seats and drive to Colorado,” Marchese told me. “But now they’re getting older, and they just want to hang out with their friends–and I just want them to be happy.”
On the day before Marchese and Co. were set to load the show into the Soho Playhouse, the dining room where he and I chatted was filled with homemade-looking set pieces and gizmos–large, colorfully painted cardboard flats stacked against the walls, a primitive-looking robotic monkey in a threadbare top hat and a motorized Campbell’s soup can on an old trunk. They had presumably found storage space for the pile of 13,500 foam clown noses waiting on their front porch when they got home from California earlier this year. If Marchese’s show has a salvaged, Maker Faire vibe, that’s less a concession to budget limitations than an artistic choice, and also a kind of invitation to young audiences.“One of the greatest compliments we ever got,” Marchese said, “was after a show in Chicago, when a kid said to his mom at the merch table, ‘Mom, when I go home, I’m gonna go through the garbage can and build a magic show like Mario.’”
