I have spent most of my professional life in rooms where everything is scripted. Not magic shows. Strategy presentations. Corporate keynotes. Product launches. The kind of events where a production company has been hired, a stage manager is wearing a headset, and every single transition — from the CEO’s walk-on to the screen change to the house music fade — has been blocked, timed, and rehearsed.
In those rooms, nobody wings it. Not the speakers. Not the lighting operator. Not the sound engineer. Not the person running the slide deck. Everyone is working from a document — a production script — that specifies exactly what happens, when it happens, and who is responsible for making it happen.
I took this world completely for granted for fifteen years. It was just how things worked. You show up at the venue, you get the run sheet, you rehearse the transitions, you perform to the cue marks. The professionalism of it was invisible to me because I had never seen the alternative.
Then I started performing magic at events, and I saw the alternative.
The Professionalism Gap
The first time I performed a magic set at a corporate event — a tech company’s annual meeting in Vienna, about a hundred and fifty people — I was on a bill with three other acts. A comedian, a musician, and me. We had all been booked by the same event agency.
The comedian arrived two hours early, met with the sound engineer, walked the stage, tested his microphone, and handed the stage manager a detailed cue sheet: when his walk-on music should start, when it should fade, where the spotlight should be, when the house lights should come up for his audience interaction segment, and when they should go back down for his closer.
The musician arrived an hour early with a similar document. He had specific lighting presets for each song. He had the sound engineer run through his monitor levels for three different stage positions. He had a set list with transition notes between songs.
I arrived with a bag of props and the general idea that I would talk to people and do some effects.
The gap was not subtle. The comedian and the musician had production scripts. I had vibes.
Now, my actual performance went fine. I knew my material, I connected with the audience, the effects landed. But watching the other performers backstage, I was struck by how much more precise their preparation was than mine. They had thought about every moment of their set — not just the content, but the environment. The light. The sound. The timing of transitions. The experience of the audience between pieces, not just during them.
I was focused on performing well. They were focused on producing a show.
The Industrial Show Model
In my consulting world, I had seen this level of production many times. Large corporate events — product launches, shareholder meetings, leadership summits — are often produced by specialized companies that treat the event like a theatrical production. They write a show script that covers everything.
The script is not just dialogue. It is a complete technical document. A typical page might read something like: “SLIDE 14 advances. SPEAKER moves stage left to podium. SPOTLIGHT follows. BACKGROUND MUSIC fades to silence over 3 seconds. SPEAKER begins section on Q3 results. CONFIDENCE MONITOR displays next three talking points.”
Every element is specified. Every transition is planned. Every contingency has a backup. The audience experiences seamlessness because someone has meticulously engineered every moment. The fluidity they feel is not the absence of structure — it is the presence of extreme structure, so well executed that it becomes invisible.
Dan Harlan makes this point powerfully in his Tarbell Lesson 83 lecture on magic as theater. He calls the script “the most important aspect of all things” and lays out a framework where the script does not just carry your words — it carries the entire conceptual architecture of your performance. In Harlan’s view, the script coordinates all three aspects of theatrical performance: the inanimate elements like lighting and props, the animate elements like the performer and audience, and the conceptual elements like character, emotion, and theme.
When I first read that, I realized I had been thinking about scripts the way most magicians think about scripts — as dialogue. Words you say. But the industrial show model treats the script as the master control document for the entire audience experience. The words are just one layer.
What the Script Actually Contains
In industrial show production, the script has at least four layers running simultaneously.
The first is dialogue. What the speaker actually says. This is the layer that most magicians think of when they think of a script. It is also, in many ways, the least complex layer, because it is the one the performer is most naturally focused on.
The second is stage direction. Where the performer stands, when they move, where they end up. In industrial shows, this is specified to the foot. “Speaker begins at center mark, moves stage right during the customer testimonial section, returns to center for the close.” This matters because the performer’s physical position affects sightlines, lighting, and audience focus.
The third is technical cues. Lighting changes, sound changes, video playback, slide transitions. These are the elements that the audience is not consciously aware of but that shape their experience profoundly. A spotlight narrowing during a key moment creates focus. Music swelling under a climactic statement creates emotion. A slide advancing at the precise moment the speaker references a data point creates credibility.
The fourth is audience experience. This is the layer that most people miss entirely. The production script often includes notes about what the audience should be feeling or thinking at each moment. “By this point, the audience should understand the problem. The next section introduces the solution.” These notes guide the pacing, the energy shifts, and the emotional arc of the entire event.
When I looked at my own magic scripts — and by this point I was writing scripts, though grudgingly at first — I realized I was only working in the first layer. Dialogue. I was scripting what I said but not where I stood, not what the lighting should do, not what the audience should be experiencing at each transition.
The Six Functions, Expanded
Harlan breaks down dialogue into six functions. He identifies that every line in a script should do at least one of these: convey information, reveal character, direct attention, reveal theme, establish the level of reality, or establish tempo. That framework alone transformed how I evaluated my own scripts, because it gave me a concrete test for every sentence. If a line is not performing at least one of those functions, it is dead weight.
But the industrial show model adds something beyond Harlan’s framework. It adds the idea that the script is also the coordination document — the thing that synchronizes all the moving parts of a production into a unified experience. Your words, your body, the light, the sound, the props, the audience’s attention — all of these need to be working together, and the script is where that coordination lives.
In practice, this means my scripts have evolved from pure dialogue into something more like a director’s document. Not as detailed as a full industrial production script — I am a solo performer, not a team of technicians — but structured with the same philosophy.
What My Scripts Look Like Now
A page from one of my current scripts does not look like a page of dialogue. It looks more like a set of instructions for an experience.
I write the spoken words in one column. Next to them, I note the physical actions — which hand holds the prop, where I stand, when I turn to face a volunteer, when I step forward. Below the spoken words, I note the technical elements — when the background music should change, what the lighting should be doing, whether there is a moment where a pause should be held longer than feels natural.
And in the margins, I write what I think of as experience notes. These are reminders to myself about what the audience should be feeling at this moment. “They should be curious but not suspicious.” “This is the last moment of lightness before the tone shifts.” “The volunteer should feel like the center of attention here, not me.”
These experience notes are not for the audience. The audience will never see them. They are for me, to keep me focused on the real job, which is not performing tricks but creating an experience. When I am in the moment and the adrenaline is flowing and my brain is juggling a dozen variables at once, those margin notes pull me back to what matters.
The Consulting Crossover
Here is where my two worlds — consulting and performing — finally converged in a useful way.
In my consulting life, I had spent years building presentations where every slide, every talking point, every transition was designed around the audience’s journey. What do they know? What do they need to know next? What is the emotional state we want them in when we make the ask? How do we build credibility before introducing the controversial recommendation?
These are exactly the same questions that a performance script should answer. What does the audience know right now? What are they expecting? What emotion are we building toward? When do we shift the energy?
For years, I had been applying this thinking rigorously to boardroom presentations and then abandoning it entirely when I walked on stage to perform magic. The consulting Felix would have been appalled at the performing Felix. One had a system. The other had instinct and hope.
The industrial show model bridged these two versions of myself. It gave me permission to bring the same rigor to performance that I brought to professional presentations — not because performance needs to be corporate, but because the audience deserves the same level of care regardless of the context.
The Professionalism Standard
There is a phrase I heard from an event producer years ago that has stuck with me: “The audience does not see the script. They see the result of the script.” No one in the audience knows whether you have a twenty-page production document or a napkin with bullet points. What they know is whether the experience felt seamless or choppy, whether transitions were smooth or awkward, whether the energy built or plateaued.
The industrial show model taught me that seamlessness is not a talent. It is the product of documentation. The people who make events feel effortless are not more talented than the ones who do not. They are more prepared. They have thought about every transition, every lighting change, every moment of silence, and they have written it all down so that nothing is left to chance.
For a solo performer, this might seem like overkill. You are not coordinating a team of twenty. You are just you, standing on a stage with your props and your audience. But that is exactly why the script matters more, not less. Because when you are the only one responsible for every element of the experience — the words, the movement, the timing, the energy, the audience management — you need a document that keeps all of those elements in alignment.
The script is not just what you say. It is the blueprint for the experience you create. And the more complete that blueprint is, the more freedom you have to be present, to respond, to connect — because the structure is holding everything else together while you focus on the only thing that truly matters: the audience in front of you.
The industrial show writers figured this out decades ago. The rest of us are still catching up.