For a pair of professional tricksters, the moment Jamie Allan and Natalie Villalonga-Stanton fell for one another was surprisingly mundane.
The two, both stage magicians and illusionists, had been performing together for years. But one night in the winter of 2017, after a rehearsal in London, they found themselves locking eyes for several moments while having a curry dinner at a nearby restaurant with a group of magicians.
“It was very cliché, but we literally just looked at each other,” Villalonga-Stanton said of the moment the relationship between them changed. She admitted to having some hesitations initially for fear of jeopardizing their working relationship, but both quickly found that the level of trust required for their professional partnership formed a sound foundation for their romantic one.
“My wife flies, you know, meters above the stage every night, and I do all of these things that are potentially very dangerous,” Allan said. He believed the daring feats they have performed over the years — using pyrotechnics or lasers, for example — necessitated a high level of confidence and mutual reliance.
For Allan, 49, becoming a magician fulfilled a childhood ambition. Born near Birmingham, England, he grew up in a small village in the English Midlands, and he got his first magic set at age 5. “Since I was a kid, I never considered anything else,” he said. “I just always presumed that I would be a magician, because to me, all of my parents’ friends were professional entertainers, so that was the most normal job you could have.”
Allan’s family ran a pub with a theater. As a child, he recalled getting tips and guidance from magicians who were family friends, and at 16, he left school to pursue a career in magic.
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Villalonga-Stanton, 36, was born in Menorca, Spain, and grew up between Spain and the United Kingdom. Although drawn to the stage as a dancer, by 2012 she had been “bit by the magic bug,” she said.
Villalonga-Stanton auditioned in 2013 to be an assistant in a girls’ magic group in the United Kingdom, and then ended up being asked to become one of the magicians. By this time, Allan had developed a successful career in magic — including television appearances and a touring show of his own. He was recruited to create a “crash course” to help familiarize Villalonga-Stanton and her group with the art of performing magic tricks.
When they first met, Villalonga-Stanton was in a cardboard box, preparing for it to be punctured with swords for a trick performed by a colleague. But it wasn’t until Allan later recruited her in 2014 to join his company that the two began to work closely together.
“There’s very limited people you can be completely open with when you work in an industry which is based upon secrecy,” Allan said. After finding that confidence in one another, their relationship progressed quickly.
The marriage proposal, predictably, involved magic. Villalonga-Stanton said she was caught off guard when, in December 2018, Allan used an elaborate ruse to pop the question. The two were in Chicago inspecting a 19th-century contraption called the “Orange Tree Illusion,” and Allan asked Villalonga-Stanton for an everyday ring she was wearing, purportedly to demonstrate how it worked.
“The trick is, he takes a ring from a lady,” Villalonga-Stanton said, “and then the lady’s ring reappears with these butterflies.” “I know that that’s the routine, so I’m like, ‘Oh, he’s taken my ring, and now my ring’s going to come back.’ Except it wasn’t!”
Rather than returning the original, two mechanical butterflies presented her with a diamond ring.
“I always found it amazing that she didn’t see it coming — given that this is the most famous ring-producing device in the world!” Allan chuckled, recalling her surprise.
Although the couple had initially set the date for 2020, the wedding was postponed because of the pandemic. Their daughter was born in June 2020 during lockdown, during which time Villalonga-Stanton’s father became sick. He died in 2023.
The couple married June 18, before around 40 attendees at the New World Stages in Midtown Manhattan, the theater where they perform their production of “Amaze.”
Alex Perez, who was ordained through American Marriage Ministries, officiated. Watching the ceremony were the couple’s daughter and Allan’s two sons from a previous relationship.
Both said that their relationship had taught them about trust and also about embracing the unexpected.
“If you can live your life like a magic trick, where you don’t know what’s around the next corner, and you can find that with joy and excitement,” Allan said, “then that’s a pretty good way to live.”