Working on the Show

Today I’m starting day four of the doing the new school assembly show. The show is called Incredible Idioms and is at, language and literacy themed shows. This is very different from themed shows that I’ve done in the past. This one has a flow all the way through it. The way it’s written, I can’t easily swap out routines in the show. I really like the way it flows.

In the past with school assemblies, I’ve always had a section where I explain the rules for the audience. This show doesn’t have that, and so far the kids are behaving really well. I think I owe this to the scripting of the show and that there aren’t really any dead spots. There are slow spots, but not really any dead spots.

The warm up to the show is an alarm clock that I put a remote control into and it rings whenever I want it to. This prop is used as the warm up, a running gag and a trick in the show. The trick is that it vanished in a devil’s hank. In my test shows, that clock vanish really fell flat, and I felt that the audience knew the clock was in the hank. The first couple of days in the tour I really focused on making the vanish work for me. It turns out I wasn’t show the back of the hank after the vanish. Once I added showing the other side of the hank, the trick started to hit much harder.

That’s the fun of tours like the one I’m going, it gives you a lot of time to work out problems in the show.

-Louie

School Assembly Tour Day 1

Today is the first day of the school assembly tour and the first full performances of my new show called Incredible Idioms. This show is themed about the language we use and it’s been a lot of fun to work on.

The whole show fits inside one case and here’s what it looks like:

school assembly magic show

Unfortunately it doesn’t really travel set up. It’d be nice to just open the case and go, but there’s a lot of crushable things in there AND that picture doesn’t show things like my mics and audio cables which need to travel in the case.

The show is going to probably go through a lot of changes over the month of performing it on this tour. This is where the work comes in. I need to record, at least audio record and hopefully video record as many shows as possible and review them as often as possible. This is how a show gets good in a short amount of time.

Well, off to the first gig…

-Louie

School Assembly Show…

In less than a month I’ll be debuting a new school/library show. I’ll be on a school assembly tour for five weeks. The show is called “Incredible Idioms” and is themed on idioms.

incredible idioms show

The great thing about breaking in shows by doing three a day for over a month is that the show gets really good, really quick…Or you realize by the end of the 5 weeks you don’t like the show and never do it again.

The key to these is actually putting in the work. I’ll be doing a lot of reviewing video and writing every night and the first week or two the show will be rough, but then it’ll be super tight for the rest of the tour. Oh, by rough, I mean just good, and not great. I’ve done school shows for a long time, and have a good general sense of what kids like (but the do surprise me sometimes).

Right now I have a ton of half built props and half written routines. It feels like the show won’t be ready in less than a month, but once one routine gets completed, they’ll all domino into being built.

-Louie