The show includes one of Houdini's original brown leather straitjackets and a rare recording of the magician's voice, which was higher and lighter than might be expected from a man with such an intimidating stare. The exhibit displays about 100 artifacts - documents, photographs, his father's Bible, a set of see-through handcuffs - culled from private collections across the U.S. The innovative escape artist, movie actor, pilot and debunker of fakes became one of the world’s most successful performers before his death from a ruptured appendix - not from drowning in the Water Torture Cell (as some treatments of his life suggest) - in 1926.In celebration of the opening of the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s newest exhibit, Inescapable: The Life and Legacy of Harry Houdini, Baltimore-based entertainer and escape artist, Dai Andrews, recreates one of the international superstar’s greatest feats. His father, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz, and mother Cecelia changed the spelling of the family’s last name to “Weiss,” Erik’s first name to “Ehrich.” Living first in Appleton, Wisc., then in New York City, the young performer took the name “Harry Houdini” in honor of influential French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin and started his own career at the age of 17. Watkins and Allen learned all about the life of Erik Weisz, who was born in Hungary in 1874 and came to the United States in 1878. “I started studying him once Nathan started working on the play.” “As a kid, I did a book report on Houdini, and I grew up learning magic,” he says. You kind of look like him.’ ”Īt the time, Watkins was hardly a Houdini expert. “But the No. 1 reason was because of Dennis,” Allen says.
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