There is a corporate event in Vienna that I think about more than I should.
It was about two years into my performing life. A room of maybe a hundred people, a good client, a well-structured set. I had been working with the sequencing and emotional arc principles for several months, and the show was landing better than ever. The build was working. The texture was varied. The closer was strong.
And on this particular night, everything aligned in that way that sometimes happens — the audience was warm, the energy was right, the timing was sharp. My closer landed with the kind of reaction that makes you feel like you are floating. The gasp. The silence. Then the eruption. People on their feet. Genuine, spontaneous, uncoordinated standing ovation.
It was the mountaintop.
And then I did the worst thing I could possibly have done. I performed another piece.
I had planned an encore. A small, fun effect that I thought would be a nice button on the evening — a little send-off, a bit of levity after the intensity of the closer. So when the applause died down, instead of taking my bow and walking off, I said, “Actually, before I go, one more thing…”
I could feel the shift the moment I started. The energy in the room, which had been at its absolute peak, did not rise further. It could not. There was nowhere higher to go. Instead, it began to leak. The audience sat back down. Their faces shifted from electrified to polite. They watched the encore with the same courtesy they would give a colleague’s PowerPoint addendum after the real presentation was over.
The encore was technically fine. The effect worked. They clapped. But the clap at the end of the encore was not a fraction of what the closer had produced. And worse — far worse — the audience left the room remembering the encore, not the closer. The last thing is the thing they take with them. And the last thing I gave them was a deflated balloon where a fireworks finale should have been.
I drove home that night understanding, with painful clarity, what Ken Weber means when he writes that you can take the audience to the mountaintop only once. Not that you should take them there only once, although that is implied. That you can. Once you have reached the peak — once the audience has experienced the maximum emotional intensity your show can produce — any additional content is descent. There is no higher to go. There is only down.
The question I did not have an answer to, standing in that Vienna parking lot reviewing my mistakes, was this: how do you know when you are on the mountaintop? How do you recognize the peak while you are standing on it, in real time, with an audience in front of you and adrenaline in your veins and the plan in your head saying there is still one more thing to do?
The Signals
I have spent a lot of time since then learning to read the signals that tell you the audience has peaked. They are not subtle, but they are easy to miss if you are not trained to look for them — partly because you are focused on performing and partly because the signals are in the audience, not in yourself.
The first signal is the quality of silence. There is a difference between the silence of an audience that is waiting for something and the silence of an audience that has been stunned. The waiting silence is attentive and forward-leaning. The stunned silence is deeper. It has weight. It sits in the room like something physical. When you hear that silence — when the room goes quiet in a way that feels thick rather than empty — you are at the peak.
The second signal is the collective intake of breath. This is difficult to describe and unmistakable when you experience it. At the moment of maximum impact, the audience does not gasp individually. They gasp as one organism. You hear a single, unified intake of breath from dozens or hundreds of people, and the sound of it tells you that every person in the room had the same experience at the same instant. That synchronized response is the peak. You will not get another one.
The third signal is applause that begins before you are done. When the audience is so moved that they cannot wait for you to finish — when the clapping starts during your final gesture, overlapping the end of the effect rather than following it — that is a peak reaction. It means the emotional pressure exceeded the audience’s ability to contain it. They had to release, and they released before the socially appropriate moment because they could not help it.
The fourth signal is the most reliable and the least discussed: the silence after the applause. When the audience applauds at the peak, the applause itself has a particular shape. It rises fast. It is loud. It sustains. And then it fades into a silence that is qualitatively different from the silence before the show. This post-peak silence is full. It is satisfied. It is the silence of an audience that has had a complete experience and does not need anything more.
That is the signal you need to read. That full, satisfied silence is the audience telling you: we are done. We have been to the top. We have seen the view. Take your bow.
The Discipline of Stopping
Recognizing the peak is one thing. Having the discipline to stop when you reach it is another.
This is hard for performers for several reasons. The first is that the plan says otherwise. If you have rehearsed a set that includes an encore after the closer, your internal script is telling you to keep going. The plan is in your head, and the plan says there is more. Deviating from the plan feels wrong, feels risky, feels like failure.
But following the plan when the plan is wrong is not professionalism. It is rigidity. The best performers I have studied — the ones who consistently produce extraordinary shows — share one quality that separates them from the good-but-not-great performers: they listen to the room more than they listen to their setlist. They are willing to cut material in real time, to skip the encore, to end three minutes earlier than planned, because the room is telling them the show is complete.
The second reason stopping is hard is that the peak feels so good. When the audience erupts, when you feel that wave of energy coming at you, the natural response is to want more. You want to keep riding the wave. You want to extend the feeling. One more piece — one more hit of that energy. It is intoxicating. And like any intoxication, it leads you to make decisions that seem brilliant in the moment and look foolish in the morning.
The third reason is the fear of shortchanging the client. In a corporate context, you have been hired for a specific amount of time. If your show peaks at twenty-five minutes and you were booked for thirty, there is a voice in your head that says you need to fill those extra five minutes or the client will feel they did not get their money’s worth. This voice is wrong. No client in the history of corporate entertainment has ever said, “The show was incredible, but I wish it had been five minutes longer.” They have, however, frequently said, “The show was great, but it sort of fizzled at the end.”
Fizzling at the end is what happens when you push past the peak. You cannot unfizzle. You cannot regain the mountaintop once you have descended from it. Weber is absolute on this point: the audience goes to the mountaintop once. Once. If you walk them back down and try to march them up again, they will not follow you. Their legs are tired. The view has been seen. The moment has passed.
The Hardest Lesson: Leaving Them Wanting More
There is an old show business maxim that says you should always leave them wanting more. I used to think this was about modesty — do not overstay your welcome, be gracious, be humble. But now I understand it differently.
Leaving them wanting more is not about modesty. It is about the architecture of memory. The last moment of a show is the moment the audience carries with them. It is what they describe to their friends. It is what they feel when they think about the experience days later. If the last moment is the peak — the standing ovation, the collective gasp, the stunned silence — then the memory of the show is the memory of being on the mountaintop. The whole show, in retrospect, becomes the experience of ascending to that peak.
But if the last moment is the descent — the polite encore, the energy leak, the gradual return to normal — then the memory of the show is the memory of coming down. The peak is still in there somewhere, but it is buried under the subsequent material. The audience remembers how they felt at the end, not how they felt at the best moment.
This is why stopping at the peak is not just a tactical decision. It is the most important structural decision in the entire show. It determines what the audience remembers. And what the audience remembers is the show.
Darwin Ortiz captures this idea from a different angle when he talks about the suspense formula — making the audience care and then making them wait. The corollary, which is implied but not always stated, is knowing when the waiting is over. When the payoff has been delivered, when the suspense has been resolved in the most powerful way possible, the story is complete. Adding another chapter after the resolution does not extend the story. It dilutes it.
My Current Practice
I now build every set with what I call a flexible ending. The closer is the closer. It is the piece I am building toward, the effect I have sequenced everything to support, the mountaintop. But after the closer, I have a contingency plan, not an obligation.
If the closer lands and the audience peaks — if I see the signals, if I hear the collective breath, if I feel the room reach its apex — I take my bow and walk off. Even if I have an encore prepared. Even if the client booked me for five more minutes. Even if my internal script says there is more to do. The show is done because the audience is done, and I have learned to respect that.
If, for whatever reason, the closer does not peak — if the audience is responsive but has not reached the mountaintop, if there is energy in the room that has not been spent — then I have the option to continue. The encore is there as insurance, not as a requirement. It is the safety net, not the tightrope.
This flexible approach requires two things. First, you need to be genuinely able to read the room. Not just in theory, but in practice, in the moment, with adrenaline pumping and lights in your eyes. This is a skill that only develops through repetition and honest self-evaluation. Recording your shows and watching them back is essential, because the gap between what you think you read in the moment and what was actually happening can be enormous.
Second, you need to be comfortable with unpredictability. If you are the kind of performer who needs to know exactly how every show will go — exactly which pieces you will perform, in exactly which order, for exactly how many minutes — then the flexible ending will feel terrifying. But predictability is the enemy of peak performance. The best shows are the ones where the performer responds to the audience rather than executing a script, and the ending is where that responsiveness matters most.
The Bow
I want to say one more thing about the mechanics of stopping, because the bow itself is part of the architecture.
When you hit the peak and decide to end, the way you take your bow communicates everything. A hurried bow — a quick nod and a fast exit — reads as insecurity. It says, “I am leaving before they realize the show was not that great.” A lingering bow — staying too long, soaking up applause, making the audience feel obligated to keep clapping — reads as neediness. It says, “I need your approval more than I need to give you a clean ending.”
The right bow is confident, warm, and brief. It says: “That was our experience together. I am grateful for it. And I am going to let it stand on its own.” You hold eye contact with the audience for a beat. You smile — not a performer’s smile, but a genuine one, the smile of someone who shared something real. You bow. You walk off. The show is complete.
The audience’s last image is you walking away from a peak. Not trudging down from one. Not chasing another one. Walking away, with the quiet confidence of someone who knows exactly where the mountaintop was and chose to leave them standing on it.
That is the discipline. That is the craft. And it is, I think, one of the hardest things in all of performance: knowing when the journey is complete and having the courage to let it end.