There is a line in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment that I have underlined, starred, and returned to more times than any other single sentence in the book: “There is a huge difference between HAVING a climax and BUILDING to one.”
The first time I read it, I nodded and moved on. Of course. Obviously. You build to a climax. Everyone knows that.
The second time I read it — months later, after performing dozens of shows that felt structurally sound but emotionally flat — I stopped nodding. Because I realized I had been doing the first thing and thinking I was doing the second. I had a climax. I did not build to one. And the difference, once I finally understood it, changed the way I think about every show I put together.
What “Having a Climax” Looks Like
Having a climax is simple. It means your strongest effect goes last. That is it. You take the piece that consistently gets the biggest reaction, and you put it at the end of the set. The logic is straightforward: end on your best material and the audience leaves with the strongest possible impression.
This is what I did for the first year and a half of performing. I had four or five effects that I rotated through various combinations, and whichever configuration I was using, I made sure my best piece was the closer. It seemed like common sense. It seemed like the minimum requirement for competent show structure.
And in a narrow sense, it worked. The closer always got the strongest reaction. The audience always left having just experienced my best material. Check the box. Climax achieved.
Except here is what actually happened from the audience’s perspective. They experienced a series of effects at roughly the same emotional intensity — let us call it a seven out of ten — for twenty-five minutes. Then, at the end, they experienced an effect at maybe an eight or a nine. The relative increase from seven to nine felt modest. The closer was clearly the strongest piece, but it did not feel dramatically stronger than what came before. It felt like a slightly better version of the same experience.
I was ending strong. I was not building to anything.
What “Building to a Climax” Looks Like
Building to a climax is fundamentally different. It does not start with the end. It starts with the beginning.
Building means engineering every moment so that emotional intensity, impossibility, and dramatic tension increase progressively from first moment to last. The opening is deliberately set at a lower intensity — not weak, not boring, but calibrated to establish a baseline from which the show can rise. The middle has escalated from the opening. And the climax arrives not as a marginally better version of what came before but as the culmination of a thirty-minute trajectory that has been pulling the audience upward the entire time.
Think of it this way. In the “having a climax” model, the audience’s emotional experience across a thirty-minute show looks like this: 7, 7, 7, 7, 9. A flat line with a bump at the end.
In the “building to a climax” model, it looks like this: 4, 5, 6, 7, 10. A rising line where every point is higher than the last, and the final moment feels like a ten not because it is objectively twice as powerful as a five but because the trajectory of the entire show has primed the audience to experience it at maximum impact.
The same closing effect that registers as a nine when preceded by a flat line of sevens registers as a ten when preceded by a carefully engineered escalation from four through seven. The climax has not changed. The build has.
The Symphony Analogy
The best way I have found to explain this to people outside of performing is through music.
A symphony does not just have a loud ending. It builds through four movements, each with its own internal structure, each relating to the others in a carefully designed arc of tension and release. The quiet opening exists not because the composer lacked ideas but because that quietness establishes the emotional ground from which everything rises. Each movement develops and escalates. And the final movement arrives with a force that would be impossible without the preceding forty minutes of preparation.
Now imagine a symphony where every movement was at fortissimo. Maximum volume and intensity from the first bar to the last. The experience would be exhausting and emotionally flat. Not because the individual moments were weak but because without variation in dynamics, there is no contrast. Without contrast, no shape. Without shape, no build. Without build, no climax.
I think about this every time I structure a show now. Am I writing a symphony or am I just playing loud the whole time?
The Realization
The moment this distinction crystallized for me was at a private show in Vienna. It was an event for a financial services company, about forty people, after-dinner entertainment. I had restructured my set based on what I was learning from Weber. Instead of opening with one of my stronger effects, I opened with something lighter — a simple, engaging piece that established a connection with the audience and set a conversational, relaxed tone. Nothing earth-shattering. Just pleasant and intriguing.
From the inside, this felt terrifying. I was holding back my strongest material, and the voice in my head was screaming that I was going to lose the room. That if I did not impress them immediately, they would check out and never come back. The consulting presenter in me was saying “Lead with your strongest point.” The performer in me was saying “Hit them hard or lose them.”
I ignored both voices and trusted the structure.
The second piece was noticeably more impossible than the first. The third involved audience participation that created genuine engagement and laughter. The fourth was a shift in tone — more serious, more dramatic, higher stakes. And the closer was the same effect I had been using for months, the same piece that had previously registered as “really good” at the end of my flat-line sets.
This time, the reaction was different.
Not different in kind — the audience did not start speaking in tongues or levitate out of their chairs. Different in intensity. The gasp was louder. The silence before the applause lasted longer. The applause itself was stronger. And afterward, at the bar, the conversations were different. People did not say “That was really good.” They said things like “How is that even possible?” and “I still cannot figure out how the last one worked” and “That ending was incredible.”
Same effect. Same method. Same performer. Different context. The build made the climax hit harder.
Why the Flat Line Feels Natural
If building is so much more effective than flat-lining, why do so many performers — including me, for longer than I care to admit — default to the flat-line approach?
I think there are two reasons.
The first is fear. When you are up there in front of people, every instinct screams at you to prove yourself immediately. To show them you are worth their attention. To hit hard and keep hitting. The idea of opening with something modest feels like a risk. What if they tune out? What if they decide in the first three minutes that you are not impressive and never recover? The fear of losing the audience drives you to front-load your strongest material, which destroys the build.
The second reason is that we tend to evaluate our material in isolation. When I was selecting my set, I thought about each effect individually. Is this effect strong? Check. Is this one strong? Check. Are they all strong? Check. Good, I have a strong set. But “strong” is a relative term, and I was not thinking about relative intensity between effects. I was thinking about absolute quality within each effect. This is the difference between asking “Is each brick solid?” and asking “Does this wall lean?” You can have five perfect bricks and still build a flat wall.
The Practical Shift
Here is what changed in my process when I started building instead of flat-lining.
First, I stopped thinking about my set as a list of effects and started thinking about it as a trajectory. Instead of asking “What are my best five effects?” I started asking “What is the emotional journey I want the audience to take?” That question produces very different answers. It forces you to think about beginnings, middles, and ends. It forces you to think about pacing, escalation, and contrast.
Second, I started deliberately opening lower. Not weak — Weber is clear that the opening must earn the audience’s trust and attention. But lower than my instinct wanted. I began selecting openers that were charming and engaging rather than jaw-dropping. This gave me room to climb. Room that my previous flat-line approach had eliminated by starting at seven.
Third, I began thinking about each effect not in terms of its absolute strength but in terms of its relative position on the escalation curve. An effect that is an eight when evaluated in isolation might need to be positioned third in the set, not second, because the escalation from six to eight is more effective than the escalation from seven to eight. The math of building is relational, not absolute.
Fourth, I started paying attention to the transitions between effects as opportunities to signal escalation. A subtle shift in tone, a change in energy, a brief comment that implies the stakes are rising — these small moments tell the audience, often unconsciously, that the show is progressing upward. They are the click-click-click of the roller coaster chain.
The Formula That Is Not a Formula
I want to be honest: there is no formula for this. I cannot give you a template that says “Open at intensity four, move to five in minute seven, hit seven by minute fifteen, and close at ten.” Every show is different. Every audience is different. Every combination of effects creates a different dynamic.
But the principle is constant: every moment should feel like it is taking the audience somewhere they have not been yet. Not by giant leaps — those are jarring and unsustainable. By incremental, almost imperceptible escalation. The audience should not be able to point to the moment where the show shifted from “pleasant” to “extraordinary.” They should simply arrive at the climax and feel, in retrospect, that the entire show was pulling them there.
Darwin Ortiz captures it perfectly: “Make them care, then make them wait.” That formula works within individual effects, but it also works across an entire show. Make the audience care — through the opening, through the connection you build, through early effects that engage without overwhelming — and then make them wait. Not by stalling. By escalating, each increment slightly larger than the last, until the climax arrives and the accumulated investment of thirty minutes pays off in a single, overwhelming moment.
That is the difference between having a climax and building to one.
I have a climax now. But more importantly, I have a build. And the climax lands with a force that the same effect, sitting at the end of a flat-line set, never could have achieved.
Weber says you can take your audience to the mountaintop only once. If you deliver your biggest moment in minute five, you have twenty-five minutes of terrain that is, by definition, lower. But if you engineer every preceding minute as a progressively steeper ascent, the peak arrives at the moment of maximum anticipation and maximum emotional readiness. One mountaintop. One true climax. One moment where everything converges.
This is the architecture I am learning to build. And it gets more nuanced from here — because the build is not just about escalation. It is also about contrast. About valleys. About the moments where you deliberately pull back so the next surge forward hits harder.
That is what we will explore next.