I have a secret. Want to know what it is? It’s one of the most powerful secrets in magic, shared by top professionals worldwide, guaranteed to increase your audience response exponentially. I’ll share it with you, but not until I ramble on about something else. See? All secrets have a price.
Every book, article, video or lecture on performing I have come across insists that developing a stage character is crucial to developing a strong performance. Developing a stage character provides a unifying force throughout your performance. It ties everything together. It makes the routines you perform your own. It provides the basis for your humor. It’s what sets you apart from other performers. Yet despite its importance, stage character has remained one of the most nebulous concepts in performance theory.
There are two main mistakes I’ve seen new performers make when it comes to character. The first is to ignore character entirely. Performers making this mistake usually pick and choose their routines based on the strength of the effect alone. Often their patter mirrors the patter provided with the trick when they bought it. This results in a hodge-podge of material that doesn’t quite suit them. Despite how strong the individual moments may be, something intangible is missing from the whole and it shows.
Here’s a quick test to see if you fall into this trap: “The degree to which other magicians can successfully use your material without changing it is the degree to which your stage character has been developed.” How well does your material hold up?
Being true to your stage character involves screening the effects and routines you perform in your show. Ideally a magician’s character and material should clearly express each other. Unfortunately, this means having to turn down some incredible tricks if you can’t figure out how to make them work with your character. This kind of sacrifice can be painful. I’ve been playing with Whit Hyden’s “4 Ring Routine” and Steve Bedwell’s “In Over Your Head” rope routine for the last couple of years. They are incredibly strong and hilarious routines, and I would love to add them to my act. I can’t, however, because they just don’t fit, and it hurts.
The second mistake is to go to the opposite extreme and concentrate too much on character. Performers of this type mix their own romantic notions of character into their performance. They let their imaginations get carried away with “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” trains of thought.
I’ve seen magicians and jugglers excuse parts of their behavior by saying it’s part of their character. One juggler I knew confided to me that, “My character is a bit of a jerk…” Usually this is done in an attempt to meld a more modern stand-up comedy style with their act. Unfortunately they usually lack the experience to make it work.
The biggest flaw in this approach, from my point of thinking, is that your performance is not about you. It’s about the audience. Your character shouldn’t please you, it should please THEM.
So how should you approach defining your own stage character? Here are a few thoughts to set you on your way: First, remember you should be developing just one character. Don’t try to develop separate characters for separate venues. You’ll end up with several poorly defined characters instead of one strong one. Because of this, make sure the character you develop has broad appeal.
Second, start by being yourself. More to the point, be a better version of yourself. All I have ever striven for in my own stage character is to be a little smarter, a little funnier, a little more engaging, and a little more outgoing than I am in real life. Oh, and I try to be taller on stage too.
Third, performing is about energy: the energy you give to the audience, and the energy you receive from the audience. Your character should maximize this energy, ideally rendering you “larger than life”.
Fourth, take your time. Start with an idea of what you want your character to be like and then start performing. After your first dozen shows, take a look at who you are onstage. Take another look after a hundred shows. I honestly think coming to terms with your stage character is a question of soul searching, age and experience. Remember all those hard, painful “character building” lessons your father tried to teach you? Well, you have to go through them again, only this time on stage in front of hundreds of complete strangers, night after night.
Finally – and this is the big one – make your character likeable. This is the one trait that all successful magicians have in common. To paraphrase an old show business saying, “If they like you, you can do no wrong. And if they don’t like you, you can do no right.”
Nothing is more powerful than an audience liking you. In his excellent book Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy, Jay Sankey points out that when a crowd likes you, they will pay more attention to your routines and will forgive any mistakes you may make. They will grow bored less easily, laugh more when you are funny, and clap harder when you astonish them. Liking you, the audience is simply more receptive, more patient, and more responsive. Simply by being likeable, you are guaranteed to dramatically increase your audience’s reactions to your effects.
How can you maximize likeability? You can start by respecting the audience and caring about what they think and feel. Crowds sense if you care about them and care about what you are doing. Smile. Be sincere. Put the audience’s needs above your own.
Here’s a great example. I was watching a local magician perform for a group of adults. They were mostly banker types and a bit slow to get into the spirit of things. As luck would have it, there happened to be a single child in the audience. He was about four and incredibly cute. The performer noticed him and made a comment along the lines of how horrible it was for this little kid to be stuck at a party with all these adults. He then stopped his show, brought the kid up, and did the Magic Coloring book just for this one child. Did I mention how cute this kid was? It was perhaps the most endearing thing I’ve ever seen. From that point on, the audience was his. He could have bludgeoned his next three volunteers, and the crowd still would have forgiven him.
So that’s the big secret: being likeable is better than being good. Maybe it’s not such a big secret, but it merits repeating now and again. But don’t repeat it too loudly. I don’t want my competition to hear.
