Las Vegas · Los Angeles
William
Vontobel.
Magician·Musician·Thirteen Years at Capo’s Speakeasy
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Las Vegas · Los Angeles
Magician·Musician·Thirteen Years at Capo’s Speakeasy
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The Magic of V
I’ve spent thirteen years as the house magician at Capo’s Speakeasy. Close-up magic, mentalism, and comedy — right in your guests’ hands. Corporate events, weddings, and private parties across Las Vegas and Los Angeles. No stage. No smoke machines. Just the kind of moment people talk about the next day.
themagicofv.com →
The Music of V
Forty years on guitar and piano. I play the songs your guests actually know — Dylan, Prince, the Beatles, Dave Matthews, Ed Sheeran — solo acoustic with full backing tracks, so it sounds like a full band without the full band price.
themusicofv.com →Hear It
Now Performing
featuring The Magic of V
When
Thu · Fri · Sat
Showtime
9:00 PM
Where
Capo’s Speakeasy
Seats
25 maximum
The back room. Pay what you feel — at the end. Ages 15+. Free parking.
There’s a password. There’s a phone booth. Ask at the bar.
April 6, 2002 · Lakeland, Florida
I was at a fan-club dress rehearsal. Prince pulled me out of the crowd to play with the band. I had dreamed about something like that so many times that standing in the room, I couldn’t quite tell whether it was real.
It was real.
When he died in 2016, I wrote a card trick for him. During COVID, I played his music for thirty straight days. Some people collect records. I collect the ways he changed my life.
The day I met Prince
A card trick for Prince
30 Days of Prince
In His Own Words
Someone showed me a card trick when I was seven or eight. I don’t remember who. I remember the trick.
I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be a musician — forty years on guitar and piano, a couple of them studying music in college. Neither career happened the way I planned. The magic career wasn’t planned at all. It turned out to be the one that stuck.
Somewhere in the beginning
I spent nearly ten years at a summer camp in Maine called Camp Caribou, starting at nineteen. I taught everything they needed someone to teach: riflery, swimming, theater, music, arts and crafts. Eventually, magic workshops. There were kids at that camp who didn’t share a language with me. We still managed to communicate. That’s when I started to understand what magic actually was.
At the same time I was studying theater at the University of Maine at Farmington — directing one-acts, wearing a Prince hat in the newspaper. The camp and the college overlapped. Both of them taught me how to hold a room.
Camp Caribou · University of Maine at Farmington
A band called Pipe Dream, in Florida. A year in Los Angeles. A show in Las Vegas called the Top Secrets Magic Show — a manager, a production, the whole thing. The manager got greedy. The venue owner dissolved the operation but asked me to stay. “We just needed the magician. Not all the other stuff.” That room was Capo’s Speakeasy, where I’ve been the house magician for thirteen years.
On stage
There was another room: Sleuths, a mystery dinner theater in Las Vegas. More than fifteen hundred shows over ten-plus years. It closed a couple of years ago. I still sometimes say I have Sleuths tonight as shorthand for going to work. I didn’t know my last show there was my last one. Nobody tells you.
Good company
Working the room
During COVID, the rooms went dark. Everyone’s did. I sat in the apartment with Sam — my dog, the best audience I ever had — and played Prince for thirty days straight and filmed every minute of it. Because when you can’t perform for people, you perform anyway.
Sam · COVID years
The music came back. I’m playing the rooms again — guitar, piano, forty years of songs. Dylan, Prince, the Beatles. Covers people actually know. It turns out you don’t forget that either.
Two brands. Two shows. Las Vegas.
Corporate events, weddings, private parties, venue residencies —
both brands, both coasts.
Email themagicofv@gmail.com
Phone 656-347-7625