August 29th, 7 p.m., written in my dressing room at the Rio: The cast has arrived. They're having dinner at Peppermill, a sort of quintessential Vegas neon diner with cocktail waitresses in slinky evening gowns and a lounge with burning water. We'll be starting our first rehearsals around noon at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino in an enormous canvas tent building, in which we've constructed an exact duplicate of the stage and audience of the Players Theater on Macdougal Street in New York. Makeup and hair and monster people will be seeing the cast for the first time. We'll begin with a reading of the whole show for everybody involved. It'll be nice to have the whole gang in a room, listening to what I think is the ultimate campfire story -- the one that chills your bones and fills you with a rage to live. - Teller

August 30th, 2010. First rehearsal day. It's been several months since the last time I've been in Todd's physical presence. It hit me again how charismatic he is. His voice resonates in my bones and his charm is insidious. I'm so glad he's on the right side of the moral street, because if he were on the other side, he could do some damage. Todd read the show to us and we all played audience members (there is LOTS of audience involvement) and at the end applauded with evil grins on our faces. This is going to be some ride. Todd's tiny little boy, Finn (Phineas Taylor Robbins, named after Barnum) arrived today and when he looked at me and said, "Teller!" I was ready to obey. Authority runs in the family. The rest of the day was all makeup, costume, and preliminary photography. The last touches on the rehearsal set. Tomorrow there will be several people naked and covered in blood. I know that sounds titillating but to them it will be chilly, uncomfortable, sticky work.

August 31st, 11:59 p.m. Our team includes Frank Ippolito, who created the zombie makeup for my little movies "& Teller" and "& Teller 2". He tested various looks for us, trying to hit just the right level of supernatural but plausible, beautiful but revolting. Everybody now looks great, in a manner of speaking. We forced our way from beginning to end of the finale where all hell breaks loose. The sequence is only about 3 minutes long, but involves words, music, apparitions, really hard magic tricks, and some kinds of personal and tactile experiences people haven't ever felt in a theater before. It's a Rubik's Cube of action and much of it happens in the dark. Imagine a Busby Berklee number from hell with all the dancers blindfolded. But we made huge strides. This company of artists is learning to think like one large brain. Tomorrow a choreographer joins us to make a sequence sexier. After 7 hours of work, I went off to do the Penn & Teller show, and -- though this may seem counterintuitive -- I found doing my regular show invigorating. After a day of nonstop problem solving, coming into a theater full of fans and doing a show in which the material has been honed and is effortlessly fun to perform was like a cool shower on a hot day. Sleep now. I'm fighting off a cold.

September 1, 2010, 11:45 p.m. A pretty uncanny moment happened today. Today we had a choreographer, Coralissa Delaforce, in to work a crucial 1-minute sequence of supernatural activity that needed to move in a sexy way. We were really ready for her. We laid out her problems to solve and she just did it. It took all told about two hours, but at the end we had a perfect bit of action. We all rejoiced. We videotaped it and were about to send it off to our composer Gary Stockdale, to have him work music to fit the action. Then I remembered that about a week ago he'd done a musical sketch of the scene, just trying to hit on the right tone. Just as an experiment, we decided to play the music against the action that we had devised in silence. It fit perfectly. We were all gobsmacked. Johnny Thompson slapped his leg and yelled, "That's perfect!" It was a great way to start the day, and a good thing it happened, because much of the rest of the afternoon was beset with artistic obstacles. We want to give the audience one scene of a full-out classic seance. But in real life seances don't have the colorful special effects of movies. No "Ghostbusters." No entertainment, just sad people so wounded by death that they're willing to accept anything -- from random babbling to cruel lies -- as evidence of the presence of the departed. So to enter that more fanciful movie seance world, we have fictionalized a death, and used Mina "Margery the Boston Medium" Crandon (a spirit medium whom Houdini hated and debunked) to conjure up the hokum. But because we are doing fiction, we are held to higher standards than the seance room. Look at the old photos of spiritualists exuding "ectoplasm." It's clearly wet cheesecloth. We have to do better and it's not easy. Because there in a theater, your eyes are looking right at the event, in three dimensions, with no digital effects between you and the thing. Funniest exchange of the day: "Where's my orb?" "I left it on the blob."

September 2, 2010 (well, actually Sept. 3, 12:20 a.m.) A few nights ago a security guard found a desiccated prop corpse behind our stage. Thinking he had busted a murder, he immediately called his supervisor. I can only imagine that poor guard's disappointment not to be the hero of a capital crime investigation. Today we tackled the classic seance problem (see yesterday's diary entry). We furrowed our brows and argued. Todd felt the image of a skull was essential, but how could we do that without looking like some cheesy Halloween Haunt? Then we looked over at our prop corpse -- the one the security guard had "discovered." The head of that thing was disturbingly real. We all agreed that if we could conjure that image in the dark, nobody would mistake us for the Haunted Mansion. Two hours, two cups of tea and a shared banana muffin later, we had written and printed out three revised pages of script. The cast arrived and we choreographed every move to the pulsing beat of techno music from the daily party at the Rio's topless pool, which is right next door to our theater. It's a good combination: unholy resurrection and tribal sex rhythms. But, be honest: haven't teenagers been screwing on tombstones since the beginning of time? Dinner was Japanese food at Hamada, accompanied by throbbing music and a shower of Mardi Gras necklaces of the Rio's "Show in the Sky." By now the sun had set and we had our first full out rehearsal in total darkness. Even those of us who had seen the ectoplasmic mother-creature before gasped at a new effect we devised that completes the story of the seance scene. Today we saw the first of the lights Thom Weaver has been musing upon. He's gone in a direction I never anticipated, making our cold, hard space a uneasily homey. It's insidious -- an inviting tomb. Then later, Leon Rothenberg, the sound designer, wowed me with his version of a "spirit trumpet," a horn through which old-time spiritualists induced the dead to speak for themselves. Eat your heart out, modern trance channelers. Our dead talk for themselves.

September 3, 2010 (actually 1:10 a.m. September 4th). Yesterday and today were "days off" from the P&T show. "Days off" means working 2 -11 p.m. on Play Dead. The stage is walled in black brick and is full of cold case files. To unfold our tale, every file and its strange contents need to be placed to lead naturally from one scene to the next. Figuring out all these placements took 2.5 hours of theatrical algebra. My brain was numb, but Earl Grey tea and biscotti cured me. We then put an hour into making a disembodied hand show maternal affection. Then we shaped and reshaped that troublesome seance scene. I now know more than any non-percussionist should know about the acoustic properties of tambourines. A novelist can imagine and describe a character and that's the way the character looks. With conjuring, you can imagine something in your head, even describe it in words and pictures to another person, but only when you physically create it onstage can you know whether your idea was what you were looking for. And the killing thing is: the effect has to be polished to perfection before you can know. Our brains seem to have an on-off switch for magic. Either it's perfect or it's nothing. There is no middle ground. All of this is to say: Today we scrapped two neat little miracles we'd spent a month developing because once we saw them, they looked like tricks --- not creepy or disturbing. "I'll use that on 'The View,'" said Todd about one amazing but too Disneyesque effect. At the end of the day we discovered a really cool way of invading the audience's personal auditory space in the dark. Tomorrow is a day off, so don't be expecting a diary entry. The sound department invited me to a barbecue, but I'm having dinner at home for the first time in a week. Ah, dining in my courtyard beside the big bronze bear. I eat at 5 p.m., and promptly at 5:10 the hummingbird arrives to suck nectar out of the red flowers.

September 5-7. There are walls in our theater now, pipe-and-drape measuring out exactly the space in the Players Theater in New York. There is something Fellini-esque about making a miniature theater inside a gigantic one, as though we are walking onto a movie set. We're in our marathon days of rehearsing, driving through the show detail by detail, drop by ruby drop. Todd continually amazes me. Even in the most grueling mechanical blocking runthrough, he performs -- I mean really delivers every time. The house resounds with the laughter of the cast and crew who have seen the material 30 times. Todd is on fire. Leon Rothenberg and his sound team finally have a chance to show their stuff. Every once in a while I will suddenly feel profoundly uneasy, then realize it's some sound Leon's invented, sneaking just under the radar of my consciousness. We're doing long days, tiring, and I'm doing the Penn & Teller show in parallel every evening. So to make sure I don't get too worn out, I've got a cot and sometimes lounge on it to direct. I feel somehow very Erich Von Stroheim, lying back with a microphone, saying, "Let's try that again from the calliope cue." We've modified our schedule just a bit. We're now calling September 12th our final dress rehearsal and asking those who attend to understand that we may need to stop-and-go a little, maybe even to re-run a segment or two. It's not easy training an army of the dead.

Our magic director on this show is Johnny Thompson. He is in his seventies -- the oldest and most energetic member of our creative team -- and has two steel knees, which are mere symptoms that he has an iron constitution. He exudes tough, sweet love for everybody that simply fills the rehearsal hall. If you've seen the "Bullshit" hair episode, you've met Johnny -- the man with the most artistic comb-over since the beginning of time. Johnny has been the magic backbone of Penn & Teller work for as long as I can remember. Any good magic on TV you've seen from us or anybody else is likely Johnny's handiwork. Johnny typically works from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on "Play Dead." Nothing satisfies him except perfection. When I get lazy, and am willing to settle for second best for the moment, Johnny won't stand for it, and for that I am profoundly grateful. Magic is an utterly unforgiving form. He knows that. And he's more than a magic guy. Johnny has done every aspect of showbiz. He's an actor. He's a harmonica player and a true jazz cat. He's composed and arranged music for decades. He's designed and directed shows of every kind. His taste is perfect. So there is no decision I make that I do not collaborate with Johnny on. He sees through bullshit instantly. Now, this makes Johnny sound like a rigid old tough guy. No. That's not it at all. He's incredibly youthful and adventurous. He laughs. He explodes with delight. He's thrilled to try and test and probe and dare. When Johnny is in a room, everybody else gets ideas they would not have gotten on their own. He's a catalyst. On paper, I may be directing the show with Jim Millan, but there is not a moment onstage that Johnny has not been an absolutely equal directing partner on. He's also a beautiful gentleman. Johnny's lived through eras and tragedies that would have broken me. But Johnny's emerged with untarnished optimism. He has great cheekbones and huge, supple, sexy hands. When he kisses the hands of women and they blush with pleasure. When he hugs and kisses all his friends on the cheek when he greets them, we kiss him back. And this is not an act. This man has a gigantic heart and a love of life that's contagious. Tomorrow: Thom Rubino, our magic designer.

Still plowing through a thousand decisions. The classic seance scene is starting to look really, really, really amazing. But the big news of yesterday is that when all hell breaks loose, we found the right kind of "incantation" to send the demons back to hell. And it's all beautifully set up by the rest of the show. We were all pretty jubilant. But now a bit about Thom Rubino, who has constructed all the special supernatural effect props for the show. Johnny introduced me to Thom as the most talented inventive mind he had met in ages, and the finest craftsman. Thom is a blue-eyed elf of a man, boyish, sly, sweet, and incredibly humble. The first thing I saw him construct was a trap door. At a distance of 1 foot, it was utterly invisible. He'd invented a new way to cut trap doors so that there was no visible seam around them. You give an impossibility to Thom, and he says, "I'll have it for you tomorrow." AND HE DOES. As you undoubtedly know, magic is a process, where you go down many blind alleys and encounter much frustration. So often things must be constructed step by step in drafts. Many find that frustrating. With Thom when you say, "Sorry, you'll have to re-weld all four corners," he grins and says, "Forward steps!" and comes back in an hour and it's done. We are into 12-18 hour work days. Surely Thom must sleep. Surely. But I have no actual evidence of this. The thought has crossed my mind that this great artist may actually be some kind of benevolent demon, who retires to a subterranean workshop full of elves and gnomes when he's out of my sight.

I guess the "Daily diary" is a little less daily of late. When you're living life in every second and working nonstop, it's sometimes hard to find time to write about it. I can tell you: the show is finding its shape fantastically well. Last night's audience shrieked and laughed, and everybody left walking on air. Even Todd, in his usual reserved fashion said the show was "about 48 percent" of what he'd like it to be. So, today I'm taking advantage of somebody else's writing. This is from Kevin Burke, a comedy magician working in Vegas. After the show he mentioned to me that his great grandmother was a fraudulent spirit medium, who passed onto him a special gimmicked chair that held secret props inside. When he asked her "What controls did you use?" she said, "Controls?" (Controls are the practices that seem to prove that the medium is not using her hands or feet to make things move around in the darkened room -- most often apparently holding hands with the other sitters.) After a lot of praise that's too gushy for me to have the nerve to republish it, he told me more about her: "My great-grandmother, Hettie Reilly, was a fraudulent medium. She toured in vaudeville in her early years in "Nick's Roller Skating Girls", and "The Verona Cycle Troupe." In 1909, she was touring Australia, and was getting sick of the road. She bought the con from a medium there. When she returned to NYC, she opened her seance parlor. She had an elite clientele, and there were no Crandon-esque shenanigans. She was, above all, a lady...albeit one who employed private investigators to dig up info on her clients that was then regurgitated back to them from the Happy Summer-land. "In her later years, she repented of her wicked ways. When she taught me the con, she made me promise never to use it to steal, as she had, which is why the mentalism segment of my show at the Fitz carries a VERY strong disclaimer." Then he goes on with a lot of praise that would embarrass me to repeat, but he sure liked our ectoplasm.