For the last ten posts, I have been deep inside the mechanics of building to a climax — the roller coaster metaphor, the power of contrast, the pause before the reveal, the architecture of emotional escalation. That work matters. It is foundational. But it addresses one dimension of show design: the vertical. The upward trajectory. The build.
Now I want to zoom out and look at the horizontal. Not just how a show rises, but how it is laid out from start to finish. What goes where, and why.
Because here is what I have learned, painfully and slowly: knowing how to build to a climax does not tell you what to build with. Knowing that the show should escalate does not tell you what the opening should be, what the middle should accomplish, or what the final impression should feel like. Building to a climax is one principle inside a larger architecture. And that architecture — the full structural blueprint of a performance — is what this section of the blog is about.
The Trick Collection Problem
My first thirty-minute set was not a show. It was a collection of tricks that happened to be performed in sequence by the same person.
I know this now. I did not know it at the time. At the time, I thought I had built something coherent. I had chosen my strongest effects. I had ordered them so the best one went last. I had even practiced transitions between pieces so the whole thing flowed without awkward pauses. By the standards I was using, it was a well-constructed set.
The problem was that my standards were wrong.
I was thinking about effects. I should have been thinking about architecture.
The difference is the same as the difference between a pile of good bricks and a building. The individual bricks in my set were solid. Some of them were excellent. But stacking excellent bricks on top of each other does not create a building. A building requires a blueprint — a structural plan that determines what goes where, what each element accomplishes, and how the whole thing holds together under the weight of the audience’s attention.
I did not have a blueprint. I had bricks.
Finding the Framework
The framework came from Scott Alexander’s Standing Up On Stage, and it arrived at a moment when I desperately needed it.
I had been performing my trick collection for several months. Some shows went well; some went flat. The inconsistency bothered me. In my consulting work, I had learned that inconsistent results usually mean inconsistent systems. When a strategic recommendation lands brilliantly with one client and falls flat with another, the problem is rarely the content — it is the structure of the delivery. The same insight applies to performance.
Alexander lays out a show structure that is both simple and profound. It has four parts: the opener, the personality piece, the middle, and the closer. Each part has a distinct function. Each part accomplishes something specific in the audience’s experience. And each part creates the conditions for the next part to work.
When I first read it, I felt the kind of irritation that I have come to recognize as a sign that I am learning something important. The irritation of “Why did nobody tell me this before?” followed by the honest admission that someone probably did, and I was not ready to hear it.
The Four Parts
Let me lay them out, because I want to spend the next several posts exploring each one in depth. But first, the overview.
Part One: The Opener. Short. Visual. High energy. The purpose of the opener is not to establish your greatness — it is to establish your credibility. You are telling the audience, in the first two to three minutes, that you are worth watching. That you belong on this stage. That their attention is in good hands. The opener is not your strongest piece. It is your most efficient piece. It hits them between the eyes and earns you the right to take your time with what comes next.
Part Two: The Personality Piece. This is a four-to-five-minute talking routine where the audience discovers who you are. Not what you can do — they already saw that in the opener. Who you are. This is where your character, your humor, your worldview come through. The personality piece is often the least magical part of the show in terms of effect strength, and it is arguably the most important part of the show in terms of audience connection. Because here is the thing Alexander articulates that changed how I think about performing: “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as they like you while you’re doing it.”
That line hit me like a truck. I had been obsessing over what I did — the effects, the techniques, the impossibility — and paying almost no attention to whether the audience liked me while I was doing it. The personality piece is where that liking is established.
Part Three: The Middle. This is the body of the show. Audience participation. Variety. The display of skill. Elements of danger or surprise. Musical pieces if you use them. The middle is where the show breathes, where the audience is engaged in multiple ways, where the emotional texture varies and the build toward the climax begins in earnest. The middle is also where most performers — myself included, in those early days — have the most material and the least structure. It is the zone where “I have a bunch of strong pieces” turns into a muddle unless you have a plan.
Part Four: The Closer. Your strongest piece. The climax everything has been building toward. But also — and this is the part I did not expect — the closer carries an emotional temperature that matters as much as its impossibility. The closer is not just the most impressive thing you do. It is the last emotional impression you leave. And as Weber describes in Maximum Entertainment, the Vaudeville tradition understood something that modern performers often forget: close warm.
Why This Changed Everything
When I mapped my existing set against this four-part structure, the problems became immediately visible.
I had no real opener. I had been opening with what I considered my second-strongest piece — a mentalism effect that was impressive but took seven minutes and required a lot of setup and conversation. Seven minutes of audience investment before they knew whether I was worth their time. Seven minutes of trust-building with someone they had just met. In consulting, this would be like walking into a pitch meeting and spending seven minutes on your methodology before the client knew whether you understood their problem. You lose them before you start.
I had no personality piece. I went from my opening effect directly into my next effect. The audience saw my skill, but they never met me. They never discovered who this person was, what he cared about, why he was up here doing this. I was a trick delivery system, not a human being they had a relationship with.
My middle was a blur of strong effects with no breathing room, no variety, and no sense of progression. Every piece was at roughly the same energy level and roughly the same interaction style. Good bricks, stacked identically.
And my closer, while strong, was not warm. It was impressive. It was technically my best piece. But it did not leave the audience with the feeling I wanted them to carry out of the room. It left them thinking “Wow, that was clever.” I wanted them feeling “Wow, I am glad I was here.”
The Rebuild
I rebuilt the set from scratch. Not the material — most of the individual effects stayed — but the architecture.
I found an opener that took under three minutes and was purely visual. Something that hit hard and fast and said “I am the real deal” without requiring a single word of setup from the audience.
I wrote a personality piece. This was the hardest part, because it required me to figure out who I was on stage — something I had been avoiding because figuring out who you are on stage requires figuring out who you are, period. More on that in a later post.
I restructured the middle to alternate between different types of engagement. An audience participation piece followed by a display of skill. A funny bit followed by something that created genuine tension. Variety of texture, not just variety of effects.
And I rethought my closer. Not the effect itself, but the emotional tone. I wanted the audience to leave feeling warm, feeling connected, feeling like they had shared something with me rather than just witnessed something impressive.
The first time I performed the restructured set — a private corporate event in Salzburg, forty people, after-dinner — the difference was so stark that I almost could not believe it was the same material. The opener grabbed them instantly. The personality piece made them laugh and lean in. The middle kept them engaged through variety and escalation. And the closer — the same closer I had been using for months — landed with three times the impact because everything before it had been architected to make that moment matter.
Structure Is Not Rigidity
One concern I had when I first adopted this framework was that it would make my shows feel formulaic. If every show follows the same four-part structure, would they not all feel the same?
They do not. And the reason is that the four-part structure is not a script. It is a container. It tells you what each section needs to accomplish, not what it needs to contain. Within each section, you have complete creative freedom. You can change the effects, the stories, the interactions, the energy. You can make one show intimate and another high-energy. You can adapt to the venue, the audience, the occasion.
This is something I understand deeply from my work in strategy consulting. A good strategic framework does not constrain thinking — it liberates it. When you know the structure, when you know what each section needs to accomplish, you stop wasting creative energy on architecture and start spending it on content. The framework handles the engineering. You handle the art.
Before I had this structure, I spent enormous mental energy worrying about order, about flow, about whether the audience was still with me. That worry consumed bandwidth that should have been devoted to performing — to being present, to reading the room, to connecting with the people in front of me.
With the structure in place, those worries dissolved. Not because the structure guarantees a great show — nothing guarantees that — but because the structure ensures that the basic engineering is sound. The load-bearing walls are in the right places. I can focus on what happens inside the rooms instead of worrying about whether the building will collapse.
What Comes Next
Over the next several posts, I am going to explore each part of this structure in depth. The opener. The personality piece. The middle. The closer. What each one requires, what mistakes I made with each one, and what I have learned about making each one work.
But I want to end this opening post with the principle that underlies the entire framework: a show is not a collection of effects. It is an experience with a beginning, a development, and a destination. The audience does not remember individual tricks. They remember how the experience made them feel. And how the experience makes them feel is determined not by the quality of the individual pieces but by the architecture of the whole.
Get the architecture right, and good material becomes great. Get the architecture wrong, and great material becomes forgettable.
I got it wrong for a long time. I am still learning how to get it right. But the four-part blueprint gave me something I had never had before: a map. Not a GPS that dictates every turn, but a map that shows the terrain, the major landmarks, and the destination. How I travel between them is up to me.
That freedom within structure — that is what performing started to feel like once I had the blueprint. Not a cage. A compass.