Nuts And Bolts
As I mentioned on Tuesday, I spent last weekend doing a Vaudeville show in which I had a set of small acts spread throughout the show. I decided to try an experiment in audience training (in the interest of science!)… The first time I came out on stage, the audience had no idea who I [...]
This last week I was part of a Vaudeville show in which I did a series of small bits, as opposed to doing a single, longer, act. A lot of magicians worry about doing little short bits as they fear they don’t have anything that can stand up to being compressed into two or three [...]
What have I been up to? Some of this…
Continue reading about Still life with promotional materials
Magicians are, by their nature, rather reclusive. We tend to practice by ourselves or with small groups of fellow magicians. We usually go out to gigs on our own or, in the case of larger acts, with our partners and crew. Regardless of how many or how few people you have as part of your [...]
If you’ve spent much time at Renaissance Faires, you know that there’s this guy named William Shakespeare who is touted about as having written a very large number of popular plays. Many of them are quite funny – and I’m not just talking about the ones with all the blood and gore and killing. However, [...]
Continue reading about The Most Unfunny Line in Shakespeare – EXPLAINED!
This past weekend I auditioned for a theme park and one of the major Renaissance Faires in my new home state of Texas. The environment for these two auditions was vastly different, but both brought home some of the things I’ve babbled about here before: Be Very Flexible Make Your Show Modular Making an Auditor [...]
At the end of the show comes the moment you as a performer have been waiting for – your opportunity to get immediate feedback and a solid, quantifiable response to your show. You get the chance to pass your hat. It is arguably the oldest way to make your money as a performer, and the [...]
In my last post, I mentioned how wandering through a craft store could be perilous … here is the result of one such excursion … Two small wooden “rounds”, some paint, stick-on lettering from the scrapbooking section and a sharpie marker… and we have the work-in-progress “parlor” version of my” Up-Vertible”…. all for about one-third [...]
(Editorial note: This was posted originally from my Droid Phone and apparently said phone did not agree with my post. I’m discussing that issue with the phone now.) A while back I was talking to another performer regarding … another performer (yes we do that, anyone in any indistry does that) and he said, of [...]
Continue reading about The most imporant thing in a festival show
In his feature article in Genii magazine, Mac King once said that if his luggage was lost during a trip, he could put his act back together with a quick trip to the Woolworth’s. I got to thinking about that – so long as I can get to a hardware store I can put together
