and think the ambiguous ending was a little pat and too cut and dryly explained.

What I want to know is, there wasn't any explanation given for how he performed the illusions, especially the apparitions.

Is there any physical way those can be performed and was it explained anywhere?

Since the orange tree trick appears (in the film) to have had a very complicated mechanical explanation, we must assume that all the other tricks were the result of careful planning and hard work and "before their time" innovations. The fact that the magician is surrounded by a legend that he may have learned mystical tricks from mysterious otherworldly strangers and that he has lived in "the Orient" is just so much second-hand window dressing designed to keep you wonderstruck all through the film and believe in the supernatural long enough for the hero to effect his very real, very carefully-planned and very practical getaway. He does everything he does in order to elope with a woman of flesh-and-blood after all, not a ghost.

Also note that the magician fires his manager and replaces him with a crew of Chinese stagehands in order to keep his methods secret, not only from the public but also from any pressure coming from the police to divulge them. He trusts the manager with his money but not with his secrets.

The film's story also exploits the myth and mystery surrounding famous stage magicians of the XIXth century whose best tricks have been kept secret for generations by the magician's oath and never publicly revealed , some of which still seem impossible today, like one magician, David Douglas Home (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dunglas_Home ), who was reputed to have levitated out of a third-storey window and flown back in through another window in front of at least a hundred witnesses who never asked for their money back.

http://library.thinkquest.org/C01209...historical.jpg