Paul Royter has been entertaining people for thirty years.

His early shows consisted of straightforward magic acts, but later (seventeen years ago) he got into hypnosis and never turned back. Paul has travelled throughout Canada (his native land), the US, Australia, Singapore and Germany amazing onlookers with his mind-bending ability to, well, bend minds.

Now we can add Bermuda to the list of places he has been, seen and thoroughly entertained (he loved the Island by the way - always good to hear ain't it?).

Paul held court at the City Hall Theatre this past Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, plucking volunteers from the audience to act as his remarkably willing puppets.

I attended the show on Friday night, and was utterly amazed and entertained by what I saw.

Here's the skinny:

The house was absolutely jam packed by 8 p.m., and the show started pretty much exactly on time.

There were no pretences involved, just a curtain raising to reveal Paul standing alone playing with a deck of cards that he seemed to pull out of thin air (legerdemain he called it ... that is a fancy word for magic or slight of hand Pookie).

This went on for about five minutes or so, until he decided to get the audience involved in one of his tricks.

He asked an audience member (who threatened to be quite uncooperative at one point I might add) to pull a card from an imaginary deck of giant cards he was `holding' in his hand. The participant did so and Paul `threw' the cards into the sky. They landed neatly on the left stage speaker and Paul collected them and asked the participant to name the card she picked.

Now the deck was imaginary, so this woman had to make up a card, which she did after quite a bit of coaxing by Paul. She picked the ace of diamonds, after which Paul opened the deck, told us that he had placed one card in the deck facing the opposite direction to all the others prior to the start of the show, and revealed that very card to be the ace of diamonds.

He even told us how he did it ... very well!

So that was kinda impressive and the little joke got a laugh, but the meat of the show was not even close at this point.

After the opening act (the magic), Paul asked for as many volunteers from the audience as could fit onto the stage to come up and join him.

There were thirty chairs arranged in rows and about twenty or so filled up.

So it began. The audience was asked to be absolutely silent because it was vital that the only sound the volunteers heard was the sound of his voice at that stage in the proceedings.

We were very cooperative, and the hypnosis took effect for all but about five of the volunteers from the start.

But these were still the preliminary stages; in fact, the real fun didn't start until the second half of the show (although there was that one time when those two guys woke up in each other's arms and almost went to blows right on stage).

Oh, and Lonnie was fantastic throughout the show ... as were all the `finalists' in fact.

Ok, let us forge ahead swiftly, and just say that after the intermission, all but five of the original volunteers had been eliminated due to their subconscious resistance to the hypnosis (in short, they were just sitting on stage, not doing what Paul suggested).

So when we returned from intermission, we found five participants on stage and prepared for the fun to begin. Wait, wait ... I got ahead of myself. During intermission there was this thing that Paul did: he conditioned the participants to stop whatever they were doing, hug the person standing directly to their right and say in a loud voice: "I love you baby, let's get married!" whenever they heard Paul say: "Isn't it great to be in love?"

Remember Lonnie? Well he was standing right next to my fianc? during the last three of these episodes ... very funny stuff. Lonnie Trott was perhaps the most entertaining volunteer of the evening. He was the best jockey, pianist, ballerina and happy nine year old at the xoo by far, and when Paul conditioned him to believe that the number three did not exist, his look of bewilderment when he counted twelve fingers (six on each hand) was pure gold.

But then he counted them all together and found only eleven (!) ... one, two - er - four, five ... real funny stuff.

Annette Cook was the only woman who made it to the last part of the show.

She swam frantically for her life when the giant fish she was reeling in pulled her into the water, struggled to find warmth from Lonnie when Paul suggested that it was colder than they'd ever imagined, was an extremely polished pianist and an equally refined ballerina.

Richard Walford was the guy who woke up in Javon's arms after the struggling for warmth episode and almost went to blows. Javon was a `finalist' as well, but I couldn't catch up with him after the show so I didn't get his full name. The last `finalist' was named James, and he left quickly as well.

The `Parade of Stars' was perhaps the most entertaining part of the show.

That was when James put on an outrageous performance of Elvis Presley's `Jail House Rock', believing, of course, that he was the dearly departed king.

Richard gyrated his way through the James Brown classic `I Feel Good'; Lonnie disco danced his way into more laughs when he acted out John Travolta's `Staying Alive' scene from `Saturday Night Fever'; Annette flicked her hair all over the place when she performed Britney Spears' `Oops I Did It Again'; and Javon put some work in as Ricky Martin living `La Vida Loca'.

Paul conditioned each participant to believe that they actually were these performers, and each one of them pranced around the stage like veterans when they heard the familiar chords of their various hits ... it was like magic.

Then there was the time when Lonnie thought his seat was hot, and every seat he sat in got progressively hotter until Paul `fixed' it; James thought he was the world's greatest hypnotist, then counted to three and knocked himself out; Richard became stuck to his chair and started to loudly accuse Paul of making the chair stick to him; Annette swore down that there was a fire in the hall and desperately tried to warn the audience in (what she thought was) Mandarin Chinese; and Javon `realised' that his pants were on backwards and ran to the bathroom to `fix' them (he returned with the pants on backwards and kept them that way until the end of the show).

Now I realise that some of these things sound far-fetched, and that it seems impossible to make someone do these things in front of a room full of people, but Paul Royter did it, and the volunteers knew very little about the whole thing at the end.

I spoke with Lonnie, Annette and Richard after the show, and each of them testified that they felt very relaxed and did not remember a thing from the night's entertainment.

Well, Richard remembered volunteering and feeling like he wanted to fight, but that's the only memory I recorded (I guess it's hard to forget waking up in another man's arms).

The entire show was done in good taste and good humour, and Paul stressed throughout that no one, no matter how powerful a hypnotist they may be, can make you do something that you feel is obscene or repugnant.

So that means that the volunteers were willing both consciously and sub-consciously, Paul just brought out their hidden instincts to entertain.

And entertain they did!

If you missed the show this time, don't miss it next time.

It's entertainment of a very special variety, and O'Brien Roberts and his entire team should be encouraged to bring Paul Royter back again and again.

Well done guys.