July 19, 2024 | By Kirstin Fawcett (AGI26)

Nathan Coe Marsh (A05) caught the magic bug when he was 11 years old. “A friend of my parents was an amateur magician, and he came over and at our dinner table levitated a dollar bill,” Marsh says. “I was fascinated by it.” 

Decades later, Marsh is now a successful touring magician who performs for audiences around the world; holds cruise ship and hotel residencies; and guest-appears on TV channels and programs such as NBC, CBS, FOX, and Penn & Teller: Fool Us. But he first began seriously pursuing his childhood passion as a Johnnie in Annapolis, where, between first-year tutorials and seminars, he routinely traveled three hours via bus to neighboring Baltimore County. A legendary retired magician, Denny Haney, had operated a magic shop called Denny & Lee Magic Studio in Essex, Maryland. It was there that Marsh learned the tricks of the trade—and mustered the courage to apply for a transformative summer job teaching magic to kids at a camp in the Poconos.

Marsh found himself in his element while at camp. “As a performer, there are nights when everything aligns,” Marsh says. “You are naturally in sync with the whole audience. I had one of those nights during one of my very first shows, and it became very clear, under the stars in rural Pennsylvania, that performing and connecting with strangers in that way was what I was really meant to do.”

Back in Annapolis, meanwhile, the Program’s unconventional nature was helping to prepare Marsh for an unconventional career path. He had first heard about St. John’s as a bookish high schooler in Tampa, Florida. When friends “started getting marketing materials for St John’s,” he says, “all of them were like, hey, it looks like somebody designed a school just for Nathan.”

Marsh says he gained confidence, creativity, and resilience while working his way through the Western canon and tackling history’s most complex questions head-on. “As a magician, you’re literally having to solve impossible problems,” he says. “And I think there’s really something to be said for having to work your way through Lobachevsky on your own age at age 22 without having someone pre-digest it and hand it to you. You’re not intimidated.”

Four years after his first meeting in Maryland with Haney, Marsh moved back to Florida post-graduation, where he began performing at a local dinner theater and a comedy club. He steadily booked larger venues, and in 2016 he learned that the popular magic reality show Penn & Teller: Fool Us was accepting video submissions from potential guests. Ever the Johnnie, Marsh did his homework, studying past episodes and analyzing each performer’s act. His takeaway was that the show’s casting unit was looking for tricks that were visually striking and conceptually interesting, so Marsh custom-designed a new act to fit these criteria.

“There was an empty jar on a pole,” he recounts, “and the audience writes down a bunch of things that could appear in the top of it. And [actress] Alyson Hannigan, who was the host, chose one of those things, and it appeared inside the jar. But then after it has appeared in the jar, it becomes apparent that it had to come into existence inside a jar because it doesn’t fit through its opening.”

Marsh’s Penn & Teller appearance was a watershed moment that led to him booking even more TV appearances and in-person shows. Today, the magician has performed on six continents; been hired by companies like Microsoft and GE for corporate events; and appeared everywhere from Hawaii, where he once held a six-month headline residency at resorts in Oahu and Maui, to U.S. military bases in Iraq. Recently, he was selected as the first-ever headline entertainer to perform onboard the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection’s luxury cruise ships. Marsh currently spends nine to ten months out of the year traveling for his career. Back home in Florida, he has also served as the vice president of education for the Greater Orlando Chapter of Meeting Professionals International and worked across the entertainment industry.

The summer of 2024 saw Marsh Mediterranean-bound when he did two shows for the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection during a voyage from Venice to Athens and also presented a lecture on the history of magic. While he hasn’t sat down at a seminar table in years, he still sees parallels to St. John’s wherever he goes.

“The craft of magic is this living thing—it’s a conversation across generations,” Marsh reflects. “If you’re working on a trick, you go and research it. You read about the method and look at how things have changed, and you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of past approaches to it while you’re doing it.” And like the conversations he had back in Annapolis, it never truly ends.