‘America’s Got Talent’ star comes home for a show

WASILLA — If you were bummed to see Wasilla’s own Landon Swank get eliminated from “America’s Got Talent,” check your Sunday schedule and see if you can make it to Rumrunners at the Mat-Su Resort.

Swank will be back in his old stomping grounds, putting on a show for his former neighbors. Actually, that’s not quite right.

“It looks like two shows now,” Swank said. “I guess the first one sold out pretty quick so they want to do a matinee now.”

Show times are at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., and tickets cost $20 each or $30 for couples.

Swank was eliminated from “America’s Got Talent” in the quarterfinals of this year’s competition, but one of the judges, Piers Morgan, brought him back as a wildcard. He was eventually eliminated in the finals.

The Colony High graduate said he actually hadn’t planned on being in Alaska this coming week, but an Anchorage radio station convinced him to come.

“They wanted to bring me up and it turned out that I had about a week off after I got kicked off the show,” he said from Las Vegas Thursday.

The plan is to do two Valley shows, plus a show each in Soldotna and Anchorage.

“They’ll be a lot different than the stuff I did on America’s Got Talent,” Swank said of the performances he has planned. “They’ll be a lot more interactive.”

The show, he said, gave him 90 seconds for each of his performances.

“Trying to cut things down to just be 90 seconds, they basically want a closing effect each show,” he said.

Which was good and bad. It was bad because he had to set aside a lot of what he’d been working on because it just wasn’t big and impressive enough for the show, and good because he got a chance to do a lot of things he’d been dreaming of for some time but hadn’t been able to put together.

A good example of that, he said, is the exploding box trick he rigged up for the semifinal performance. There were four numbered boxes on the stage rigged with explosives. The controls to set the boxes off were set on the judges’ table. Each judge — Morgan, Howie Mandel and Sharon Osbourne — decided on their own which box to blow up, and then Swank emerged from the remaining box.

Swank lived in Alaska for the first 19 years of his life. He graduated from Colony High School and did his freshman year at University of Alaska Anchorage before transferring to University of Nevada Las Vegas. The move south was definitely a part of his plan to focus on his magic. He’d been working on tricks since he was 7 years old. And, he said, he’s more or less self-taught.

“There’s definitely not a whole lot of magic up in Alaska, so since I was a kid I would always try to get my hands on magic books and videos,” Swank said.

A magician with a shop in Anchorage helped him build things he needed for his shows. In high school, he worked on tricks after he got home from soccer and basketball practice. In 2003, he performed on the stage at Valley Performing Arts. In 2005, at age 20, according to the biography on his website, he was the youngest person ever to compete in the International Stage magic competition and one of only two Americans invited to compete that year.

He said his fiancée convinced him to audition for “America’s Got Talent.” What most appealed to him, he said, was that it would be a good opportunity for his career. And even though he didn’t go all the way — the winner of the show gets $1 million and a Vegas stage show — it worked out about as well as it could have for him.

“The whole thing was just fantastic. Just the publicity alone was incredible,” Swank said. “The amount that I learned was amazing, too. It was very beneficial and it was also a blast to be a part of something like that.”

He learned all about professional stage rigging and got to work with professional, world-class stage managers.

“It’s been very beneficial as well just being able to meet some people in the entertainment world,” Swank said. “I met some good PR guys and things like that.”

So what’s next for Swank? Where is he going to take his talent?

“As far as I can take it. I’d love to be able to see the world doing magic. The dream has always been to have a nice big showroom built for me in Vegas” with a stage set up to do all of his tricks, Swank said. “That’s where I want to end up.”

For more information, or to book seats, call 376-3228.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.