Tag: strong magic

Emergency Show to the Rescue!

Week two of the school assembly tour starts today, I was off on Monday due to the holiday. This show was written for elementary school audiences and is a language and literacy themed show.

On Friday of last week, at my second show of the day was for a small school, so they invited all grades, kindergarten through 12th grade! That’s a huge swing of kids. When I learned of the age range, I went to my car and grabbed my emergency show prop bag.

I took out the deck of cards and did ACAAN as the warm up and won over the high school kids.

One cool thing that I noticed was that elementary school aged kids were who the show was written for, it mostly works for high school aged kids. There’s some silly stuff that wouldn’t get laughs if I was doing it just the high school kids, but the every trick got a good reaction from the older kids. That means the magic in the show is strong!

This is something I’ve always said that a lot of kid shows are missing…strong magic!

-Louie

Amazing Jonathan…

Last night I went to bed with the news that the Amazing Jonathan wasn’t doing well and woke up to the news that he had passed. I didn’t personally know him, but he had a huge influence on how I perform. His modern (for the 1990’s) style of performing didn’t use a lot of magic boxes, it was a lot of normal looking objects.

Unfortunately I never got to see him perform live, I just know his work from television. I did try to see him live once when I was about 19 at a local comedy club. The early show was an all ages show and the night I went it was sold out…the whole weekend was.

Jonathan has probably had more bits stolen than any other comedy magician. All of his gags are super strong and work as a stand alone bits. His work will live on as gags in other people’s show, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I guess after I’ve left this world, it’d be pretty cool if people doing my material, but while I’m alive I’d probably have a different view of this…
-Louie

Little Interuptions…

Over the weekend I performed at a church camp for kids that were probably 10-12 years old. When you take kids out of their normal routine, they push a lot of boundaries that they probably wouldn’t push if they were at home, school, or their normal church. They are figuring out the rules, and the … Continue reading “Little Interuptions…”

Over the weekend I performed at a church camp for kids that were probably 10-12 years old. When you take kids out of their normal routine, they push a lot of boundaries that they probably wouldn’t push if they were at home, school, or their normal church. They are figuring out the rules, and the way a kid figures out the rules is to figure out how far they can go.


When the preshow started I had one kid doing yelling out things. If they are going to do that, that’s the time do it, not once we hit the body of the show. Also my preshow has good tricks and one of the reasons it’s there is to get the kid who is yelling out things to shut up.


The kid who was yelling things wasn’t being “malicious”, he was being a kid that didn’t know the rules, or lacked attention at home and needed to find a way to get it. When I was younger I used to be very confrontational with these kids. It worked, but it’s not the person I am any more. Currently, simply ignoring it and doing strong magic, that tends to work in most instances.