The event was a corporate awards dinner in Graz. Sixty-five people, formal setting, good client. I had been booked months in advance. I had my set list finalized, my opener polished, my transitions smooth. I drove down from Vienna feeling prepared. Confident. Ready.
Then I walked into the venue and saw my “stage.”
There was no stage. There was a corner of the room, roughly three meters by two meters, wedged between the wall and the dessert table. The dessert table. My performance area shared a border with a tiramisu and a Black Forest cake. The ceiling was low. The lighting was a single overhead fluorescent tube. There were no wings, no backdrop, just a wall with framed photographs of the company’s founding partners staring at me with expressions that seemed to say, “This was a conference room before you arrived, and it will be a conference room after you leave.”
My opener — the visual piece I had spent months developing, the one that required me to move laterally, that needed at least four meters of clear sightline, that depended on the audience being at a certain distance and angle — was impossible in this space. Physically impossible. Not “difficult to pull off” but “the geometry does not work.”
I had forty-five minutes before showtime. One opener. No backup plan. And a dessert table.
The Scramble
What followed was one of the most stressful forty-five minutes of my performing life. I stood in that corner, trying to figure out what to open with. My second piece was the personality piece — a talking routine that does not work as an opener because it requires the audience to already care about me. My third piece was audience participation — terrible as an opener because no one volunteers for a stranger they have not yet decided to trust. My fourth piece was my closer — and you do not open with your closer, for reasons I discussed in the last post.
I ended up improvising something from my close-up repertoire. A piece I had been doing at cocktail receptions and private dinners, never on stage. I scaled it up as best I could, added some theatrical framing on the spot, and performed it for sixty-five people in a corner next to a tiramisu.
It was fine. Not great. Not the clean, confident, punch-between-the-eyes opener I had planned. Just fine. The audience was polite. They gave me their attention. I clawed my way through the rest of the set and, by the middle section, had won them over enough to deliver a strong second half. But the first ten minutes were shaky, and I knew it, and that knowledge sat in my stomach for the rest of the performance.
On the drive back to Vienna that night, I made a decision. I would never again walk into a venue with only one opener. Never.
Scott Alexander’s Principle
When I went back to Scott Alexander’s Standing Up On Stage after that Graz disaster, I found the advice I had glossed over the first time: always have multiple openers ready.
Alexander does not just mention this in passing. He emphasizes it as fundamental to professional performing. The logic is simple and, in retrospect, obvious: you cannot control the venue. You cannot control the stage size, the lighting, the audience configuration, the noise level, or the hundred other variables that determine what will and will not work in a given space. What you can control is your preparation. And preparation means having options.
I had read this advice the first time through and filed it under “makes sense, will do eventually.” That is the luxury of reading about performing from the comfort of a hotel room — everything “makes sense” and nothing feels urgent until it ambushes you between a wall and a dessert table.
Three Openers
After that night, I spent the next two months developing two additional openers. My goal was to have three, each designed for a different type of performance environment.
Opener One is my primary. It is visual, it moves, it requires a reasonable stage area and a clear sightline. When the conditions are right — which is most of the time — this is what I use. It is the opener I described in the last post: fast, clean, undeniable. The punch between the eyes.
Opener Two is what I think of as the close-up friendly option. It requires minimal space. I can perform it in a corner, on a tiny stage, in a restaurant, next to a dessert table if necessary. It works at close range and does not depend on the audience being at a specific distance. It is less visually dramatic than Opener One, but it is more intimate, and in a small space, intimacy is an asset. The audience does not feel like they are watching a stage show that has been awkwardly crammed into a corner. They feel like they are having a private experience.
Opener Three is the universal. It works in any space, at any distance, with any audience configuration. It is not as strong as the other two in their optimal conditions, but it has no conditions. Conference room, ballroom, outdoor stage, cocktail bar — it works everywhere. It is my insurance policy. If everything goes wrong and the venue is nothing like what was described, Opener Three will function.
Developing three openers was not three times the work of developing one. The second and third were faster because I already understood what an opener needs to accomplish. I was not starting from scratch on the concept — I was adapting the concept to different physical constraints. That is a very different kind of creative work, and it went faster than I expected.
Reading the Room
Having three openers did something I did not anticipate: it made me a better reader of rooms.
When you have only one opener, you walk into the venue and evaluate it against one question: “Can I do my opener here?” Yes or no. Binary. And if the answer is no, you are in crisis mode, scrambling for alternatives while your stress response makes creative thinking impossible.
When you have three openers, you walk into the venue and evaluate it against a different question: “Which opener fits this room?” That is a creative question, not a crisis question. You are choosing, not scrambling.
I started noticing things I had never noticed before. The energy of the room as guests arrived. Whether the audience was seated theater-style or at round tables. The sight lines from the back row. Whether the audience was close together or spread out. All of these factors influence which opener works best. A close, packed audience in a small room calls for the intimate opener. A convention hall calls for the big visual piece. A weird, unpredictable space calls for the universal.
The ability to read these signals and make an informed choice is the difference between a performer who imposes their show on the room and a performer who adapts their show to the room. The audience cannot articulate this difference, but they feel it. A show that fits the room feels natural. A show that fights the room feels slightly off. And that feeling colors the entire experience.
The Consulting Parallel
This principle maps directly onto something I learned as a strategy consultant.
In consulting, you never walk into a client meeting with one approach. You prepare your primary recommendation, your alternative if the client pushes back, and your fallback if the meeting goes in an entirely different direction. You read the room in the first five minutes and choose your approach based on what you observe.
The consultants who consistently land their recommendations are not the ones with the strongest content. They are the ones with the most flexible delivery — the ones who can pivot because they prepared multiple paths to the same destination.
Performing is identical. The destination is always the same: establish credibility, earn the audience’s attention, set the conditions for the rest of the show. But the path to that destination changes with every venue, every audience, every room.
The Freedom of Preparation
There is a paradox in this that I want to name because I think it applies far beyond magic and far beyond consulting.
More preparation creates more freedom.
This is counterintuitive. We tend to think of preparation and freedom as opposites. But in practice, they are partners.
When I had one opener, I had no freedom. I was locked into a single plan, and any deviation was a crisis. When I developed three openers, I gained the freedom to choose. To read the room. To respond to the actual conditions rather than the conditions I had hoped for.
The preparation — the months of developing and rehearsing multiple openers — is what made the freedom possible. Without those months of work, “reading the room” would be useless information. I could observe that the space called for an intimate opener, but if I did not have one prepared, the observation would only increase my frustration.
Freedom is not the absence of preparation. Freedom is the product of preparation.
The Graz Callback
A year after the dessert table disaster, I got booked for another event in Graz. Different company, similar size, similar format. When I arrived, the venue was beautiful — a proper stage, good lighting, plenty of space. Opener One conditions, no question.
But as I was setting up, the event coordinator rushed over. There had been a last-minute change. The CEO wanted to make a speech from the stage, and it was running long, and could I possibly perform in the area by the bar instead? It was smaller, but “it should be fine, right?”
I looked at the bar area. It was maybe three and a half meters wide, tables on both sides, a low ceiling with decorative beams. Not as bad as the dessert table corner, but nowhere close to what I had planned for.
“No problem,” I said. And I meant it.
I walked over to the bar area, assessed the space, chose Opener Two, and performed a show that was, by any honest measure, better than the show I would have given on the main stage. Better because the intimate space called for the intimate opener, and the intimate opener created a warmth and closeness that the big visual opener could not have achieved in that configuration.
The audience was six feet away from me. They could see my expressions, my hands, the details that get lost at stage distance. The close-up opener drew them in rather than projecting out at them. And that closeness carried through the rest of the set. The personality piece felt like a conversation rather than a performance. The middle section felt like shared experience rather than spectacle. The closer — performed inches from the front row — hit with an intimacy that my stage version has never matched.
Afterward, the CEO came up to me and said it was the best entertainment they had ever booked. I thanked him, and I did not mention that his last-minute venue change had actually made the show better.
The Lesson
The lesson is not just “have multiple openers.” The lesson is that preparedness transforms problems into opportunities. The venue change in Graz was only a problem if I had one plan. With three plans, it was an invitation to choose the best option for the actual conditions — which turned out to be better than the conditions I had originally planned for.
Every performer will face the unexpected. Stages that are smaller than promised. Audiences that are configured differently than expected. Sound systems that do not work. Lighting that is wrong. The question is not whether these things will happen — they will — but whether you are prepared to respond with a choice rather than a crisis.
Have your primary opener. Have your backup. Have your universal. Walk into every venue with the confidence of someone who has options.
Because the moment you stop worrying about whether your opener will work in this specific room is the moment you start focusing on making the show extraordinary. And that focus — born from preparation, liberated by options — is what separates a performer who survives the unexpected from a performer who thrives in it.
The dessert table taught me that. I owe that tiramisu a debt of gratitude.