There is a moment in one of my mentalism pieces where something impossible is revealed. I will not describe the effect, but the moment itself is one of those clean, visual revelations where what the audience sees should not match what they expected. It is the climax of the piece — the moment the entire routine has been building toward.
I have performed this piece well over a hundred times. I know exactly what is going to happen. I know it the way I know my own name. There is zero uncertainty in my mind about the outcome.
And yet, every time I perform it, I need the audience to believe that the outcome is as surprising to me as it is to them. Or at least that the outcome is meaningful to me — that it matters, that I feel something when it happens, that I am not just going through the motions of a routine I could do in my sleep.
This is the central acting problem of magic. You are performing a script whose ending you know, and your job is to make that ending land as though it were happening for the first time. Every single time.
For a long time, I did not think about this problem. I just performed. The effect worked, the audience reacted, and I moved on. It was not until I started studying the craft of scripting more seriously that I realized how much I was leaving on the table by not scripting my own reaction to the magic.
The Bagel Principle
Pete McCabe has a concept in Scripting Magic that he attributes to magician Jonathan Levit. McCabe calls it the “Don’t ignore the bagel” principle, and it goes like this: if something amazing happens — if a bagel suddenly appears on the table out of thin air — you cannot just ignore it and keep talking. You have to respond to it. You have to acknowledge that something extraordinary just occurred. Because if you do not, you are sending the audience a signal that the extraordinary is ordinary to you, which deflates the entire experience.
When I first encountered this idea, my reaction was: of course. Obviously you react to the magic. That is basic performance. Who would not react?
Then I watched a video of myself performing.
And I did not react. Not really. At the moment of the climax — the moment the impossible thing was revealed — I gave a small smile and moved on to my closing line. A smile. That was my entire response to what the audience had just witnessed: a seemingly impossible prediction coming true, a moment that should have been astonishing, and my reaction was the facial equivalent of “neat.”
No wonder the audience’s reaction was muted. I was telling them, through my non-reaction, that this was not a big deal. If the person performing the miracle was not moved by it, why should they be?
The Actor’s Problem
Robert-Houdin, the great French conjurer of the nineteenth century, famously said that a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician. I had read that quote many times. It is one of the most cited lines in magic literature. But I had never really reckoned with what it means in practice.
It means you are acting. Not in the sense of being fake — in the sense of deliberately crafting a performance that includes your emotional responses, your reactions, your apparent inner experience. The surprise you show at the climax is not spontaneous. It is scripted, rehearsed, and delivered with the same care as your opening line or your volunteer interaction.
This was difficult for me to accept. My background is not in acting. I am a consultant who learned magic as an adult. The idea that I should be scripting my reactions felt dishonest — like manufacturing something that should be real.
But here is what I eventually understood: authenticity in performance is not the same as spontaneity. Authenticity means the audience believes what you are showing them. Spontaneity means you are making it up in the moment. You can be authentic without being spontaneous. In fact, scripted authenticity is often more convincing than genuine spontaneity, because when you actually know something amazing is going to happen, your nervous system does not produce surprise. Your body has learned that this moment is routine. The “authentic” reaction to your hundredth performance is no reaction at all — which reads as indifference.
The actor’s job is to bridge that gap. To create the appearance of wonder when the actual feeling is familiarity. This is not dishonesty. It is craft.
What I Had to Script
Once I accepted that my reaction was part of the script, I had to figure out what that reaction should look like. This turned out to be more complex than I expected.
The first question was: what emotion am I trying to convey? Not “surprise” in general, but what specific shade? Shock. Delight. Disbelief. Quiet awe. Each one communicates something different about the performer’s relationship to the magic.
For my mentalism piece, I landed on quiet disbelief followed by warm satisfaction. The disbelief says: even I cannot quite believe this worked. The satisfaction says: but I am genuinely glad it did. Together, they create a sense that the performer is sharing in the audience’s experience rather than standing apart from it.
The second question was: how do I physicalize this reaction? Emotions are internal. Performance is external. So I translated the response into specific actions. For the disbelief: a beat of stillness, a slight narrowing of the eyes, a slow exhale. For the satisfaction: a slow smile that builds from nothing, a small nod, eye contact with the volunteer, then with the audience.
I scripted all of this the same way I write dialogue. “PAUSE. Look at the result. Beat of stillness. Slow exhale. Then: the smile builds. Nod. Look at volunteer. Look at audience.”
The third question was: what do I say? My old version had me moving straight to the closing line. The new version includes a brief verbal reaction — a few words that give the audience permission to feel what they are feeling. The verbal reaction does not explain the magic. It simply acknowledges the moment.
The Rehearsal Challenge
Scripting a reaction is one thing. Performing it convincingly is another. This is where the acting dimension of magic becomes real, and it is where I struggled the most.
The problem is that scripted reactions can easily look scripted. A forced smile is worse than no smile. A theatrical gasp is worse than a quiet acknowledgment. If the audience detects that your reaction is performed rather than felt, the entire moment collapses. Instead of sharing in the wonder, they are now watching someone pretend to be surprised, which is the opposite of magic.
The solution I found was to ground the reaction in a real emotional memory rather than manufacturing the emotion from scratch.
Before I perform the piece, during my preparation, I take a moment to remember a time when something genuinely surprised me. Not a magic moment — a life moment. A moment when I received unexpected good news or when something I had been working toward finally came through.
I hold that memory lightly — just keeping the emotional flavor accessible. Then, when the reveal arrives, I let that flavor color my reaction. The pause, the look, the smile — they are all scripted in their mechanics. But the emotional quality comes from a real memory, and that reality shows.
This is a basic principle of acting — sense memory, emotional recall. Actors have been using it for centuries. For me, coming from a non-acting background, it was a revelation. It turned my scripted reactions from something mechanical into something alive.
The Levels of Reaction
One thing I learned through trial and error is that the level of your reaction has to match the level of the effect. Overreacting to a minor moment is as bad as underreacting to a major one.
In my show, I have effects of varying impact. If I react to the quick, clever moments with the same intensity as the powerful climaxes, the small moments feel inflated and the big moments lose their distinctiveness. If I am equally amazed by everything, the audience has no way to know which moments are truly special.
So I script different levels of reaction. For a quick effect: a small smile and a brisk “okay” before moving on. For a medium-impact effect: a brief pause and a nod of satisfaction. For the big climax: the full physicalized response — stillness, disbelief, the building smile.
These gradations serve the same function as dynamics in music. If everything is loud, nothing is loud. The variation creates a sense of build, with the biggest emotional payoff at the moment that deserves it.
What the Audience Reads
Here is what I have observed when my reaction scripting is working well. The audience does not see a performer reacting to a trick. They see a person experiencing something remarkable. And because humans are wired to mirror the emotions of people they are watching, the audience begins to experience the moment through my reaction.
When I pause and look genuinely surprised, the audience’s surprise deepens. When I smile with apparent delight, the audience smiles. My reaction gives them permission and a template for their own emotional response.
This is why the bagel principle matters so much. If you treat the impossible as routine, you are denying the audience the emotional template they need. They look to you for guidance on how to feel, and if your face says “this is normal,” their brains will downgrade the experience to normal. But if your face says “this is extraordinary,” the audience’s experience is magnified. They feel the wonder more deeply because you are feeling it with them.
The Paradox of Practiced Surprise
There is a beautiful paradox here. The more times you perform an effect, the less surprising it is to you, and the better your scripted surprise needs to be. A beginner might produce a convincing reaction by accident — real anxiety reads as excitement, real relief reads as delight. A seasoned performer must deliberately construct the reaction that the beginner gets for free.
Even now, with my reactions scripted and rehearsed, I guard against the gradual erosion that comes with repetition. The scripted smile can become mechanical if I stop grounding it in real emotion. The scripted pause can become a dead beat if I stop filling it with genuine attention.
The script does not solve the problem once and for all. It gives you a framework, a set of physical and verbal tools, and a starting point for the emotional work that has to happen fresh every single time.
That is the craft. Not just saying the right words in the right order. But feeling — or at least convincingly performing — the right things at the right moments. The script as written is the skeleton. Your emotional commitment, renewed every performance, is what gives it life.
Do not ignore the bagel. Script your reaction to the impossible. Then make it real, every time, as if the impossible had never happened before.