Table Magic Theatre

I remem­ber well when about 18 years ago, I wanted to open a small theatre of my own, where close-up magic was per­formed even­ing after evening.

A few years later I was help­ing a fel­low magi­cian with his show and I sug­ges­ted per­form­ing close-up magic at a round table, with the spec­tat­ors sit­ting around in mul­tiple rows, like in an ancient Greek open-air theatre. All this, of course, influ­enced by my own ideas and dreams I had for years.

There were reas­ons for it. I was always obsessed with the act of Albert Gos­h­man. I saw quite a few pic­tures of him per­form­ing at a round table. Then he said many times, that he did “table-top magic theatre”. That means a com­plete act or show, cho­reo­graphed and the­at­ric­ally staged, using even music in his per­form­ance pieces, per­formed on a table top. People sit­ting right at the table and exper­i­en­cing the magic right in front of their nose, being actu­ally involved. That’s the idea. And I got sort of fix­ated on this. Obsessed. Albert Gos­h­man’s way of per­form­ing was the inspir­a­tion and found­a­tion for my ideas. He has to get all the cred­it, for elev­at­ing close-up table magic into a the­at­ric­al act.

The idea of the Greek theatre, of course, is a clas­sic and his­tor­ic­al one and sug­ges­ted more spec­tat­ors, which all had a good view of the per­form­ing sur­face (due to the ascend­ing seats). With all that, my idea of per­form­ing a “round table magic theatre” was born and in fact, we star­ted to build the very first round table with a dia­met­er of about 2 meters the next day in the work­shop. Covered with green felt and with fringes at the edge, it was a rough mod­el, but it worked! We star­ted to routine close-up pieces for this spe­cial “stage setting”.

Since then my friend elab­or­ated greatly on this idea and made a huge suc­cess in Ger­many com­mer­cially. His magic lounge is the biggest and most impress­ive place you will find. It is an enorm­ous enter­prise. As usu­al in magic, when someone has suc­cess with an nov­el idea, this is over­taken by oth­er in no time and so we have now in Ger­many quite a lot of these close-up magic theatres. Along with this comes a cer­tain way, these theatres appar­ently are sup­posed to look like. A new trend is up and run­ning full power …

My point gets clear­er when you study the pic­tures. These are from three suc­cess­ful theatres oper­at­ing in Ger­many and Switzer­land. As you can see, these ven­ues are struc­tured all almost the same lines: a lounge, a bar and a round (or half-round) table, with spec­tat­ors seated in Greek style, with ascend­ing seats.

What they all have in com­mon is that close-up tricks, which were ori­gin­ally inten­ded for intim­ate per­form­ing set­tings with a max­im­um of 8 spec­tat­ors sit­ting right at the table, are now per­formed for audi­ences up to 150 per­sons – actu­ally more a stand-up crowd (but seated in ascend­ing rows). Of course, some­times video screens are used to enhance the vis­ion for the spec­tat­ors sit­ting farer away, mak­ing it more “close-up” and trans­form­ing close-up hand­made magic into a high-tech spectacle.

Noth­ing against the shows and the mater­i­al – the guys per­form very well and present some excit­ing shows for the pay­ing pub­lic. All have in com­mon that lounge char­ac­ter, which a magic theatres these days appar­ently must have. Nat­ur­ally, this is the place where the com­mer­cial side hap­pens with the selling of drinks, snacks, fin­ger food and whatever. All of them play full-even­ing shows, each about 2 hours dur­a­tion (with a break). The set­ting, atmo­sphere and magic­al con­tent seem to be very much alike. All are great, but none of them seems to stand out from an ori­gin­al­ity point of view for me.

So this devel­op­ment went far away from my ori­gin­al plan of an intim­ate table-top theatre in the style of Albert Gos­h­man (with at most 20 or so spec­tat­ors) into a full fletched stand-up show, which is bears the decept­ive and allur­ing title “close-up magic” or “table theatre magic”. We still have a sim­il­ar situ­ation at our magic con­ven­tions (at least at most of them, there are excep­tions, of course), where close-up shows are still put into unfa­vor­ably set­tings, being per­formed for audi­ences of some­times a few hundreds.

The same holds true for the major­ity of close-up com­pet­i­tions. Is this a good trend? I am not sure. Surely the theatre oper­at­ors do their abso­lutely best try­ing to cre­ate a pro­fes­sion­al set­ting for close-up. Wheth­er this is the prop­er set­ting indeed, is doubt­ful. There is noth­ing wrong with magic theatres, but then if the set­ting is like that shown in the cur­rent theatres, then a lot more stand-up routines would have to be shown. To call this “close-up magic” or “magic per­formed up close” is no longer the truth.

But what really looks dis­turb­ing to me is, that all these theatres look very much the same. The struc­ture, the set­ting and the concept. I have quite a lot of com­pletely dif­fer­ent look­ing theatre con­cepts for magic in my mind (and on the con­struc­tion paper). Some­thing that is really new and fresh, and has a dis­tinct and dif­fer­ent look and feel. It is a pity as well, that the tricks shown are more or less stand­ard: Chop Cups, end­less card routines (Ambi­tious Card, Oil and Water, fol­ded cards to any­where, col­or changes, and on), the usu­al coin stuff (3‑fly, CTT, coins across), rope stuff, cups and balls and tons of “men­tal­ism”. More ori­gin­al­ity and vari­ety in selec­tion and con­struc­tion of the magic mater­i­al would really be appre­ci­ated. oth­er­wise it seems like ‘Have you seen one, then you have seen them all.’ And – if per­form­ing for so many people, the mater­i­al has to be brought up into the art of stand-up present­a­tion – means going from hori­zont­al to ver­tic­al. A mat­rix on the table-top is no fun to watch from the 7th row …

My opin­ion on this of this kind of theatre (close-up tricks for a stand-up audi­ence) changed. Per­son­ally, I think it is wrong. I was wrong then in the past. I learned and I cor­rec­ted my wrong think­ing paths. Today I think com­pletely dif­fer­ent about how real close-up magic has to (or should be) per­formed. my ini­tial idea years ago is a one-way-street.

If I were to open such a thing these days, I would­n’t go for that plain theatre style. I have quite a few inter­est­ing ideas for oth­er ven­ue formats, which do not kill the ori­gin­al idea of true close-up and are much more excit­ing. Ideas that go bey­ond that trend and that are much more suit­able for the audi­ence to exper­i­ence real close-up. So far, nobody is inter­ested in my ideas. And why should they? The cur­rents sys­tems seem to work.

As every­body knows: Nev­er change a run­ning sys­tem. It is easi­er to fol­low a work­ing path. Really? Why not dare to go into anoth­er direction?