This is post two hundred and eighty, and it is the final post in the Videotape Revolution section of this blog. Fifteen posts about video review, audience observation, the trusted friend method, accepting honest feedback, and the director’s notes approach. Fifteen posts about the tools and methods for closing the gap between what you think you are doing on stage and what you are actually doing on stage.
I want to close this section with the argument that ties everything together: the argument for why every performer, at every level, regardless of experience or talent, needs a director.
Not wants. Needs.
The Impossible Task
Here is the fundamental problem of solo performance, stated as plainly as I can state it: you cannot be both the performer and the audience at the same time.
You can develop awareness of the audience while you perform. You can read the room, feel the energy, adjust pacing. But these are not the same as seeing the performance from the outside. They are the performer’s best guess about the audience’s experience, filtered through concentration, intention, and self-image.
What feels smooth from the inside looks rushed from the outside. What feels commanding looks rigid. What feels connected looks disconnected. This gap is not a failure of self-awareness. It is a structural feature of performance. The person doing the thing cannot simultaneously experience what it is like to watch the person doing the thing.
Ricky Jay and David Mamet
Ricky Jay was, by many accounts, one of the most accomplished sleight-of-hand artists of the twentieth century. His card work was legendary. His knowledge of magic history was encyclopedic. His stage presence was commanding in a way that few performers in any discipline have matched. He performed on Broadway. He acted in films. He consulted for major productions on the use of deception and illusion.
And when it came time to shape his one-man shows — the performances that would stand as the definitive expression of his artistry — he did not do it alone. He worked with David Mamet.
Mamet, the playwright and director, sat in rehearsals and shaped the performance from the outside. He brought a dramatist’s eye to the structure, the pacing, the theatrical arc. He could see things that Jay, from inside the performance, could not see. Not because Jay lacked awareness or intelligence or decades of experience. Because Jay was performing, and performing occupies the mind in ways that prevent the simultaneous, objective evaluation of the performance.
This was not a casual arrangement. Jay specifically sought out Mamet — one of the most respected theatrical minds in America — to serve as the outside eye. A master of his craft chose to submit his work to the judgment of someone who could see it from the seats.
If Ricky Jay needed a director, what exactly makes the rest of us think we do not?
The Pattern Across Performers
The more I studied performance history, the more I found this pattern. Penn and Teller have each other — their partnership functions as a mutual directing relationship. Derren Brown works with collaborators who help shape his stage shows. His performances feel like they spring from a single mind, but behind them is a process involving trusted outside eyes.
No serious actor performs without a director. No symphony orchestra performs without a conductor. No Broadway show reaches the stage without people whose job is to sit where the audience sits and shape what happens on stage.
Magic, for some reason, has traditionally treated the director’s role as optional. The solo magician develops material alone, rehearses alone, performs alone. The internal feedback loop — did it feel good? Did the audience seem to respond? — is better than nothing. But it is dramatically less effective than a knowledgeable outside observer.
Dan Harlan’s Rehearsal Framework
Dan Harlan, in his comprehensive lecture on magic as theatre, lays out the theatrical rehearsal process in seven stages. Read-through. Simple on-stage rehearsal with script in hand. Blocking — establishing movement and positioning. Adding business — working with props and actions. Going off-script. Full rehearsal without stopping. And finally, dress rehearsal with everything in place.
At every stage, there is a director. Someone watching from the outside, taking notes, and giving feedback at the end. The performer does not evaluate their own blocking. The director evaluates the blocking. The performer does not decide whether a moment landed. The director reports whether it landed. The performer does not determine pacing. The director shapes pacing based on what they observe from the audience’s perspective.
Harlan makes the critical distinction between practice and rehearsal. Practice is perfecting individual elements. You can stop. You can repeat. You can drill a specific section. Rehearsal is running the complete performance without stopping, and then receiving notes. The “without stopping” part is essential, because it simulates the actual performance condition. And the “receiving notes” part is essential, because it closes the feedback loop.
Ken Weber makes a parallel point in Maximum Entertainment: a live, knowledgeable mentor scrutinizing your particular act is something no book can replace. He designed his entire book as a substitute for a director — director’s notes for performers who do not have a director. But he is the first to acknowledge that the substitute is less effective than the real thing.
Weber’s own career was shaped by his role as a director for other performers. His legendary performance workshops at the Psychic Entertainers Association involved sitting in the darkness during shows, pad and pen in hand, taking notes on what he saw on stage. And then standing before his peers and delivering those notes with specificity and honesty. The performers who received his critiques were experienced professionals, many of them among the best in their field. And his notes made them better, because he could see what they could not see.
Why Solo Performers Resist
If the case for having a director is so strong, why do so many solo performers resist it?
Part of it is practical — finding someone qualified and willing takes effort. It requires vulnerability, scheduling, and submitting creative decisions to external scrutiny.
But the deeper resistance is psychological. The solo performer’s identity is built around autonomy. Inviting a director feels like admitting that the singular creative vision needs external correction.
This is a misunderstanding. A director does not replace the artist’s vision. A director helps the artist realize their vision more fully by providing the audience’s perspective, delivered with craft knowledge and honesty. When Adam gives me notes, he is telling me where my vision is not translating clearly to the audience. The creative decisions remain mine. What Adam provides is the view from the seats.
My Own Journey
I came to magic as an adult — a strategy consultant who bought a deck of cards in a hotel room because he could not bring music on the road. No performing background, no childhood in theatre.
For the first year and a half, I was my own director. I reviewed video, took notes, applied frameworks. And I improved, steadily if slowly.
But the rate of improvement changed dramatically when I started getting outside eyes on my work. Thomas, providing the audience’s raw experience. Adam, providing craft-informed directorial notes. The combination accelerated my development more than any amount of self-review could.
Self-awareness has a ceiling, and that ceiling is the impossibility of being both performer and audience simultaneously. A director raises that ceiling — not by doing the work for you, but by seeing the work from a vantage point that is structurally inaccessible to you while you are performing it.
What I Advocate
Let me be specific about what I am advocating, because I do not want to create the impression that every performer needs a full-time theatrical director.
At minimum, find one person who can serve as an outside eye during development and refinement. Even a perceptive non-performer is better than no one. Use them during rehearsals — full run-throughs followed by specific notes. Use them periodically during live performances — the trusted friend method.
If you can find someone with genuine craft knowledge, use them for the intensive directorial work: structural notes, pacing adjustments, presentation refinements. This does not need to happen for every show. It needs to happen during the building phase and periodically during maintenance.
And if you truly cannot find anyone, build the most rigorous self-review practice you can. Record every show. Apply the five-viewing protocol. But know that self-review, no matter how disciplined, has a ceiling. And know that the ceiling can be raised, dramatically, by a single person sitting where the audience sits and telling you the truth.
The Capstone
This section of the blog — the Videotape Revolution — has been about seeing yourself clearly. It began with video cameras and the revelation that what you think you are doing on stage is not what the audience sees. It moved through the technical discipline of reviewing recordings, the practice of observing your audience’s unfiltered reactions, the method of planting a trusted observer in the crowd, the emotional challenge of receiving honest feedback, and the craft of structured directorial notes.
All of these methods serve the same purpose: closing the gap between intention and perception. Between what you mean to do on stage and what you actually do. Between the show you experience from the inside and the show the audience experiences from the outside.
The video camera was the revolution. It made this gap visible for the first time. But the camera is a tool. The person who interprets what the camera shows — whether that person is you, a trusted friend, or a knowledgeable director — is what turns visibility into improvement.
Find your director. Whether it is a collaborator, a mentor, a trusted friend with a notepad, or a fellow performer who will watch your run-through and tell you the truth. Find someone who will sit where the audience sits and see what you cannot see.
Ricky Jay had David Mamet. Penn has Teller. The greatest performers in history have understood that the view from the stage and the view from the seats are two fundamentally different experiences, and that excellence requires access to both.
You are not the exception to this principle. Neither am I. Neither was Ricky Jay.
Get someone on the other side. And then listen to what they tell you.