Charly Wonder, a life in magic
She’s “just a kids magician”
Of course, anyone who’s seen Charly Wonder perform knows she’s a lot more than that.
Charly is what many in the magic world would call a master magician, especially when it comes to kids birthday magic shows and family entertainment. She’s spent a lifetime learning how to make children laugh, gasp, participate, and feel like the real stars of the show. While she’s best known for her kids magic shows, Charly is just as comfortable entertaining schools, family gatherings, community events, corporate audiences, and performing strolling magic and lots of public shows.
Regardless, performing for kids has always held a special place in her heart. When Charly was named Nickelodeon’s Entertainer of the Year, it confirmed what thousands of families already knew: she has a rare gift for creating magic that connects.
Charly’s love of magic began when she was around 7 years old. Her best friend did a simple trick called the ball in vase where tiny red ball vanished from a pocket and appeared inside a little vase, and that moment changed everything. The next day, her dad siad all she could talk about was magic. If memory serves, he surprised her by taking her to a magic shop in Boulder, Colorado. She remembers only fragments of that first visit: a long counter, glass cases, and the feeling that she had walked into another world. But the image of that little red ball disappearing and reappearing in a tiny vase at her friends house, sitting outside, a bright cloudless summer day is burned into her memory.
Nearly five decades later, Charly is friends and peers with magicians who worked in that very shop in the 1970s. It is entirely possible that one of them met her that day and sold her dad the first magic trick that would quietly begin her lifelong path.
From that moment on, Charly had a two-word wish list for birthdays, holidays, and anyone interested in giving her a present: magic tricks.
As a kid, Charly’s dad worked in the music business and had a recording studio in an industrial building near the now-demolished Cinderella City mall, home of Zeezo’s Magic Castle. On weekends, when her dad had custody of Charly and her younger brother, he would put a $20 bill in her 11-year-old pocket and send the two of them off to the mall. It was 1977, and $20 felt like a fortune.
Looking back, Charly laughs that it was probably lucky she didn’t lose track of her brother, or that’s what she hopes. Zeezo’s was magical. It immersed her in the world of magic, and a hobby that would mold her life. She still reminisces about that innocent time when a magic shop could change the direction of a kid’s entire life.
Her family spent a lot of money on magic over the years, and Charly still owns some of those original props today. In fact, one of the pieces in her current show is a prop her grandparents gave her when. she was 12 years old. She’s kept it in good working order, although it has been refurbished a few times over the past 40+ years.
After graduating high school, Charly went to work at a Zeezo’s in Buckingham Square, another demolished relic of Colorado’s past. She still remembers the smell of pizza from across the way. Working in a magic shop was a dream. Years later, after leaving the business side of the music industry in 2004, Charly took every bit of money she had, some she didn’t, and opened her own vision of a magic shop in Colorado Mills Mall.
It was another dream come true. The shop was close to becoming profitable when the economy collapsed in 2008, turning that dream into a challenge on too many levels to fully share here. But Charly’s love of magic was not destroyed. Soon after she created a long-running magic show at Heritage Square Amusement Park in Golden, Colorado, performing well over a thousand shows until the park’s final chapter.
Since then, Charly’s performed magic full time for audiences around the world. Along the way, she won Nickelodeon’s Entertainer of the Year and recognized as “Top family entertainer” by CBS.
Charly is also an accomplished close-up and strolling magician, bringing impossible moments directly into people’s hands at private parties, restaurants, corporate events, and social gatherings. Over the last couple of years, she served as one of the house magicians for Holey Moley in Denver, Colorado, performing magic in a lively, interactive environment.
There is another side of Charly’s magic as well. For adult audiences, she can step into a different performance skin entirely: sharper, darker, stranger, and built for grown-up rooms. That alter personality allows her to explore a very different kind of magic, but what makes Charly especially unique is how completely she understands the difference between those worlds.
People who have seen both sides of her often marvel at the way the adult magic personality never leaks into the kids magic personality. The children’s shows remain warm, funny, silly, age-appropriate, and completely built around the kids. At the same time, the joy and playfulness of the kids magic personality absolutely does span every magic show she performs. Even in her adult work, there is still that spark of wonder, mischief, and connection that began when she was a child seeing her first magic trick.
That range has made Charly equally at home in birthday parties, schools, comedy clubs, family events, close-up settings, and theatrical productions. Over the last couple of years, she has performed more than 50 shows at Gnarly’s Comedy Club in Golden, Colorado, including headlining the club’s first-ever magic show and hosting a weekly summer magic show in 2025.
Charly is also deeply respected within the magic community. She is one of four members in 70 years to be elected by her peers to serve three times as the local president of both the Society of American Magicians and the International Brotherhood of Magicians. She served as President in 2004, 2006, 2012, and 2013, Vice President in 2005 and 2011, and Secretary in 2010.
Her experience with children’s entertainment goes back almost as far as her experience with magic. At the age of ten, Charly was cast as a founding player in the Colorado Children’s Theater Ensemble. During high school, she started a successful children’s theater group that performed more than 250 daycare center shows a year. Her professional performing career began at age sixteen, when she booked her first paying magic show.
Charly is also a parent, which has shaped the way she connects with kids and families. She has two sons, both now in their twenties. Her oldest is a Type 1 diabetic and has followed a career path inspired by his mother. Her youngest is in college earning a teaching degree.
After a lifetime in magic, theater, family entertainment, comedy clubs, close-up magic, and live performance, Charly Wonder brings more than tricks to every show. She brings history, experience, comedy, heart, and the ability to make children feel like something impossible really happened right in front of them.
So yes, she is “just a kids birthday magician.”
But sometimes, that means being the person a child remembers for the rest of their life.