I was at the Prater in Vienna on a Sunday afternoon. This was not a work trip. It was one of those rare weekends where I had no consulting gig, no event to prepare for, no hotel room to retreat to. A friend had suggested the Prater, and I said yes, and for a few hours I was just a person at an amusement park, eating Langos and watching families try to win stuffed animals at the shooting galleries.
Then I got in line for one of the larger rides, and something happened that changed how I think about performance.
The line was long. Maybe twenty minutes. And I noticed, about five minutes in, that I was not bored. I was not impatient. I was, in fact, increasingly excited. The longer I waited, the more I wanted to ride.
This made no rational sense. The ride itself would be the same whether I waited two minutes or twenty. The experience at the top of the drop would produce the same amount of adrenaline regardless of the queue length. And yet the wait was doing something to me. It was not merely delaying the experience. It was amplifying it.
I started paying attention to the design of the queue itself. The path wound through a themed area. The walls had visual elements — images, props, atmospheric details — that established the mood. The sound design shifted as you got deeper into the queue. Music changed. Ambient sounds increased. You could hear the ride operating in the distance — the rush of carts, the screams of riders, the metallic clank of the mechanism. Other people’s reactions became part of your experience. Their excitement fed yours.
By the time I reached the front of the line, my heart was already beating faster. And the ride had not started yet.
I pulled out my phone and made a note: “The setup is the show.”
The Disney Principle
I went down a rabbit hole after that afternoon. I started reading about theme park design, and specifically about the philosophy behind queue design at Disney parks. What I found was a masterclass in anticipation engineering.
Walt Disney and his Imagineers understood something that most entertainers miss: the wait is not wasted time. The wait is an opportunity to build the emotional state that will make the main experience more powerful. Every queue at a major Disney attraction is designed not to distract you from the wait but to transform the wait into the opening act.
The queue tells you a story. It establishes a world. It gives you context for what you are about to experience. It raises questions — “What is behind that door? Why are those warnings on the wall? What is making that sound?” — that the ride itself will answer. By the time you sit down in the ride vehicle, you are not a blank slate. You are primed. You are invested. You care about what happens next because the queue made you care.
This is anticipation engineering. It is the deliberate, systematic construction of emotional readiness in the audience before the main event occurs.
And it is exactly what most magic performers — including, for a long time, me — fail to do.
The “Boring Part” Mistake
For the first couple of years of performing, I treated setups the way most performers treat them: as necessary evils. The setup was the part you had to get through to reach the good part. The setup was explaining the premise, arranging the props, establishing the conditions. It was housekeeping. It was the vegetables you had to eat before you got dessert.
I would rush through setups. I would keep my voice flat and my energy low during the setup, then suddenly raise everything when the “magic” part arrived. My body language during setups was closed and hurried — shoulders slightly forward, hands moving quickly, the unspoken message being “Let me get through this so we can get to the thing you actually want to see.”
The audience read that message perfectly. They tuned down during setups and tuned up during reveals. Which meant that by the time the reveal arrived, they were tuning up from a resting state rather than from a state of heightened anticipation.
The difference is enormous. An audience that goes from zero to astonishment has a certain reaction. An audience that goes from eager anticipation to astonishment has a reaction that is five times stronger. The anticipation does not just precede the climax — it multiplies it.
When I realized this, standing in that queue at the Prater, everything about my show structure needed to change.
The Queue Is Part of the Ride
Let me extend the theme park analogy, because it maps onto performance with uncomfortable precision.
In a great theme park attraction, the experience begins the moment you enter the queue, not the moment the ride vehicle starts moving. The queue is the first act. The ride vehicle is the second act. The ride itself is the third act. And the exit — the gift shop, the photo booth, the walk back into daylight — is the epilogue. Each phase is designed. Each phase contributes to the total experience.
In a magic show, the experience should begin the moment you start talking about an effect, not the moment the reveal happens. The setup is the first act. The development is the second act. The reveal is the third act. And the reaction — the pause after the reveal, the moment the audience processes what they saw — is the epilogue.
But most performers design only the third act. They obsess over the reveal. They practice the moment of impossibility until it is flawless. And they treat everything before it as infrastructure. Plumbing. The boring pipes behind the wall that nobody sees.
Except the audience does see them. The audience experiences every second of your setup. And if those seconds are flat, hurried, and undesigned, the reveal suffers — because the audience arrives at the climax without the emotional momentum that would make it hit its hardest.
How I Started Designing My Setups
The change was gradual, not overnight. I started by watching my recordings with a specific question: what is the audience’s emotional state in the thirty seconds before each reveal?
The answer, almost universally, was: neutral. The audience was attentive but not activated. They were watching politely. They were waiting for the interesting part.
That is the equivalent of standing in a blank hallway for twenty minutes before a ride. No story, no atmosphere, no anticipation engineering. Just waiting.
I began redesigning my setups with three principles borrowed from theme park design.
The first principle was immersion. A great queue pulls you into a world. A great setup pulls the audience into a story. Instead of saying, “I have a prediction in this envelope,” I started building a narrative around the prediction. Why does the prediction exist? What is at stake if it is wrong? What would it mean if it is right? The audience needs a reason to care about the outcome before the outcome is revealed.
The second principle was progressive revelation. A great queue reveals information gradually. You see hints, fragments, partial views. Each new piece of information raises more questions than it answers. I started structuring my setups the same way — revealing information in stages rather than all at once. Instead of laying out the entire premise in one block of exposition, I would establish one element, let the audience absorb it, then add another element that complicated the first. Each addition raised the stakes and deepened the investment.
The third principle was sensory escalation. In a theme park queue, the environmental intensity increases as you get closer to the ride. The sounds get louder. The lighting changes. The space gets narrower. I started applying this to my vocal delivery and physicality during setups. My voice would get slightly lower and slower as the reveal approached. My movements would become more deliberate. The space around me would tighten — I would step closer to the audience, reduce my gestures, focus my eye contact. Everything said: something important is about to happen.
The Transformation
The first time I performed with deliberately designed setups — at a small private event in Vienna, maybe thirty people — the difference in audience response was startling.
The effects were the same. The reveals were identical. But the reactions were dramatically stronger, because the audience arrived at each reveal in a state of heightened anticipation rather than polite neutrality. They had been taken on a journey before the destination, and the journey made the destination feel earned.
One moment stands out. I had a mentalism piece that involved a prediction. Previously, my setup had been efficient: explain the premise, establish the conditions, get to the reveal. The whole setup took maybe ninety seconds, and the audience was mildly curious when the reveal happened.
In the redesigned version, the setup took closer to three minutes. But those three minutes were not padding. They were architecture. I told a brief story about a conversation I had had earlier that week about coincidence and intuition. I asked the audience a question that got them thinking about their own decision-making processes. I introduced the prediction not as a prop but as a document — something I had written hours before any of them had arrived. I let them sit with the implications of that. What would it mean if this document accurately described a choice that had not yet been made?
By the time the reveal happened, the audience was not just curious. They were invested. They wanted to know. They needed to know. And when the prediction was accurate — when the document matched the choice — the reaction was not “That is clever.” It was closer to disbelief. The anticipation had done its work. The setup had primed them emotionally for an experience that the reveal, alone, could never have produced.
The Wait Is the Experience
Here is the counterintuitive truth that the Prater taught me: the wait is not the price you pay for the experience. The wait is the experience.
The twenty minutes I spent in that queue were not twenty minutes of my life wasted. They were twenty minutes of my life spent in a state of escalating excitement that made the two-minute ride feel like an event. Without the queue, the ride would have been a roller coaster. With the queue, the ride was a story with a climax.
The same principle applies to every reveal in a magic show. Without the setup, the reveal is a trick. With a well-designed setup, the reveal is an experience. The setup is where you create the emotional conditions that make the reveal meaningful.
Weber understood this deeply. His entire framework around building to a climax is predicated on the idea that the climax is only as powerful as the build that precedes it. A climax without a build is a firecracker — loud and quickly forgotten. A climax after a sustained, deliberate, carefully engineered build is a thunderstorm — overwhelming, visceral, and imprinted on memory.
The click-click-click of the roller coaster climbing the hill is as important as the drop. That is not a metaphor. That is a design principle. The climb creates the anticipation that makes the drop feel like flight. Without the climb, the drop is just falling.
Applying This Beyond Magic
I have started applying the theme park principle to my keynote speaking as well, with remarkable results. When I introduce a concept in a keynote, I no longer lead with the conclusion. I build to it. I tell a story that raises a question. I explore the question from an angle that makes the audience curious. I let them sit in the question, feeling its weight. And then, when I deliver the insight, it lands with the force of something they have been waiting for rather than something that was handed to them unprompted.
The same principle applies to sales pitches, to teaching, to any form of communication where you want the audience to feel something rather than merely understand something. Do not rush to the point. Build to the point. Make the audience want the point before you deliver it.
This is not about being slow. It is not about padding. It is about designing the journey so that the destination matters.
The Setup Is the Show
I want to end where I started, with the note I made on my phone at the Prater: “The setup is the show.”
I do not mean this figuratively. I mean it literally. The moments before the climax are where the experience is created. The climax is where the experience is confirmed. But the creation matters more than the confirmation, because without it, there is nothing to confirm.
If you are rushing through your setups to get to the reveals, you are skipping the show to get to the ending. You are fast-forwarding through the movie to watch the last scene. And the last scene, divorced from everything that preceded it, is just another scene.
Design your setups. Script them. Rehearse them with the same attention you give to the reveals. Make them dramatic, suspenseful, interesting. Make them the queue that transforms a ride into a story.
Because the audience does not remember the moment of impossibility. They remember the feeling of impossibility. And that feeling is built in the moments before the magic happens, not in the magic itself.
The queue is part of the ride. The setup is part of the show. The wait is the experience.
I learned that from a Sunday afternoon at the Prater, and I have never looked at my performances the same way since.