I performed at a corporate event in Salzburg last year, a tech company’s annual retreat, about a hundred and twenty people. After the show, a woman in her late twenties came up to me and said something I have been thinking about ever since. She said: “I liked your show because you didn’t seem like a magician. You seemed like a normal person who happens to do magic.”
She meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one. But the sentence kept rattling around in my head because of what it implies about what audiences expect when they hear the word “magician.” The word conjures an image — top hat, cape, dramatic gestures, stilted language, a persona that feels lifted from another century. And this woman was telling me, in the nicest possible way, that she was relieved I was not that.
She is not alone. I have heard variations of this feedback dozens of times. “You’re not what I expected.” “You’re more… normal.” “I thought it was going to be cheesy, but it wasn’t.” Every one of these comments is an indictment of how our art form presents itself to the world. And every one of them points toward what modern audiences actually want.
They want real people.
The Shift Nobody Taught Me About
When I started learning magic, I consumed instructional videos and books that were largely created by and for magicians. The performance models I absorbed were the ones that the magic community celebrates: technically dazzling, deeply crafted, and performed with a kind of theatrical polish that feels perfectly natural inside a magic convention and completely alien outside one.
What nobody told me — what I had to discover through performing for non-magicians — is that audience expectations have shifted dramatically over the past two decades. The rise of reality television, YouTube, podcasts, social media, and the general cultural move toward authenticity have fundamentally changed what people respond to in live performance.
Twenty or thirty years ago, audiences expected performers to be larger than life. The entertainer was supposed to be different from the audience — more polished, more dramatic, more theatrical. The distance between performer and audience was part of the appeal. You went to see someone do something you could not do, and the persona reinforced that gap.
Today, that gap is more likely to create suspicion than admiration. Modern audiences are trained by thousands of hours of unfiltered content to detect artifice. They have watched enough reality TV to know when someone is performing for the camera versus being genuine. They have consumed enough social media to distinguish between curated personas and authentic expression. And they bring all of that pattern recognition into the audience with them when they come to see a live show.
Weber’s Observation, Updated
Ken Weber wrote in Maximum Entertainment that the most successful performers present polished, confident versions of their off-stage selves. He observed that performers are often better during their lectures — where they are being themselves — than during their acts, where they adopt an artificial persona. The lecture reveals the real person, and the real person is more engaging than the character.
Weber was writing primarily for a magic-community audience, and his observation was based on seeing performers at conventions and workshops. But his insight has become even more relevant in the years since, because the broader culture has caught up to what Weber noticed. The premium on authenticity has exploded. Being yourself is no longer just good advice for entertainers — it is practically a cultural mandate.
Think about the performers who have broken through to mainstream audiences in the past decade. Derren Brown presents as an intelligent, thoughtful person who happens to be fascinated by the intersection of psychology and performance. His persona is not theatrical in the traditional sense. It is conversational, curious, slightly mischievous. He talks to his audience the way you would talk to a smart friend. And people trust him for it.
David Blaine’s entire brand is built on appearing to be a regular guy. His deadpan delivery, his simple clothes, his lack of theatrical flourishes — all of it communicates “I am not putting on a show, I am showing you something real.” Whether you find his style compelling or irritating, the approach resonates with millions of people precisely because it strips away the performance trappings that modern audiences associate with dishonesty.
Even Penn and Teller, who are theatrical in many ways, succeed because they come across as genuine. Penn’s brash intellectualism and Teller’s committed silence feel real. They feel like actual personality traits, not characters being performed. The audience senses that these are real people with real opinions and real quirks, and that authenticity is the foundation of their appeal.
My Own Struggle With This
When I put together my first thirty-minute show, I made a mistake that I suspect most adult-onset performers make. I tried to be more than I am. I adopted a slightly more dramatic tone than my natural speaking voice. I used gestures that felt performer-like rather than Felix-like. I scripted lines that sounded like things a magician would say rather than things I would say.
It was subtle. I was not wearing a cape or doing the booming voice thing. But there was a ten-to-fifteen percent elevation of persona that crept in, a layer of theatrical varnish that I applied unconsciously because I had absorbed the idea that performing meant becoming someone slightly more impressive than your everyday self.
The problem was that the audience could sense the varnish. Not consciously — nobody said “Felix, you’re being slightly more dramatic than your natural personality.” But the feedback was there in the quality of the reactions. Technically, the show worked. Effects landed, people laughed, the closer got applause. But the warmth was muted. The connection felt surface-level. People enjoyed the show but did not remember me.
The turning point came when I performed at a small gathering for friends and colleagues — about twenty people, all of whom knew me personally. For that show, I could not fake a persona because the audience knew the real me. So I just… was myself. I used my normal speaking voice. I told stories the way I would tell them over coffee. I reacted to surprises and mishaps the way I would react in conversation — with humor, with honesty, sometimes with mild self-deprecation.
And the show was better. Not just a little better. Dramatically better. The laughs were bigger because people were laughing with a person they knew, not at material delivered by a performer. The astonishment was deeper because the effects were happening to someone real, not someone playing a role. The whole experience had an intimacy and a warmth that my regular show lacked.
The lesson was obvious: the version of me that my friends experienced was more engaging than the version of me that strangers got. And the only difference was authenticity.
What Reality Means in Performance
Being authentic on stage does not mean being unpolished. This is the misunderstanding I had to work through. Authenticity is not the same as casualness, sloppiness, or a lack of preparation. In fact, it requires more preparation, not less.
When you adopt a persona, the persona does the heavy lifting. You can hide behind it. The theatrical voice, the dramatic pauses, the performer gestures — they fill the space and create an impression even if there is not much genuine personality underneath. Removing the persona means you have nothing to hide behind. You are standing in front of people as yourself, and yourself had better be interesting, well-prepared, and in command of the material.
What authenticity means in practical terms is that your on-stage self and your off-stage self should be recognizably the same person. The audience should feel that if they met you in the lobby afterward, you would sound the same, move the same, relate to people the same way. The stage version is amplified — slightly more energy, slightly more projection, slightly more deliberate in timing — but the core personality is unchanged.
This requires knowing who you are. Which, for an adult who came to performing from a completely different professional world, is actually an advantage. I know who I am. I am a strategy consultant. I am analytical, curious, sometimes impatient, occasionally funny in a dry way, deeply passionate about learning. I did not need to invent a character because I already have a personality. The challenge was simply to let that personality show on stage instead of suppressing it in favor of what I thought a performer should look and sound like.
The Audience’s Radar
Darwin Ortiz makes a point in Strong Magic that connects to this. He argues that audiences want to experience what they want to experience — they come in hoping to be amazed, hoping to enjoy themselves, hoping to connect. This natural goodwill is the performer’s greatest asset, and the fastest way to squander it is to create distance between yourself and the audience through artifice.
When you adopt a persona that does not ring true, you are asking the audience to suspend disbelief in two ways: first, to accept the impossibility of the magic, and second, to accept the authenticity of the performer. The first suspension is what magic is built on and audiences are happy to do it. The second is an unnecessary burden that works against you. Why make the audience pretend you are someone you are not when they would much rather connect with who you actually are?
Modern audiences are particularly resistant to persona-based performance because they have been trained by an entire media ecosystem to be suspicious of curated presentations. They know that the Instagram version of someone’s life is not real. They know that the polished corporate video hides messy realities. They bring that skepticism into every encounter, including live performance. And when they detect artifice, their engagement drops. Not because they are hostile but because they feel they are being sold something rather than being given something.
What This Means for the Show
Translating this into my actual show meant several concrete changes. I rewrote my patter to sound like me, not like a performer. I replaced theatrical transitions with conversational ones. I stopped using phrases that no normal human being would use in conversation. I started telling personal stories — the hotel room card practice, the clown from my childhood, the moment Adam Wilber and I decided to start Vulpine Creations — not as scripted performance pieces but as the kind of stories you would tell a friend.
I also started reacting honestly during my shows. If something surprised me, I showed it. If something went slightly wrong, I acknowledged it with humor rather than pretending it did not happen. If an audience member said something funny, I laughed — genuinely, not performatively. These moments of real reaction became some of the strongest moments in my show, because they were the moments when the audience could see that a real person was up there, not an automaton executing a program.
The result was immediate and measurable. People started talking to me after shows in a different way. Not “great show” and moving on, but genuine conversations. They asked about my consulting work, about Vulpine Creations, about how I started learning magic. They engaged with me as a person because the show had presented me as a person.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here is the uncomfortable truth that I did not want to face: being yourself on stage is harder than being a character. A character gives you permission to be bold, dramatic, funny in ways you might not be in real life. Dropping the character means your boldness, your humor, your presence all have to come from who you actually are. And if who you actually are is not very interesting… well, that is a problem no amount of technique can solve.
But I have found that most people are more interesting than they give themselves credit for, especially people who have lived full lives outside of magic. My background in strategy consulting, my travels, my late discovery of magic, my partnership with Adam — all of these are inherently interesting to an audience because they are specific and real. Generic performer characters are boring because they are generic. Real people with real stories are interesting because every real person is unique.
The audience does not want a polished performance of a fictional character doing impossible things. They want a real person, standing in front of them without pretense, sharing something genuinely remarkable. They want to feel that the person on stage is someone they could know, someone they could trust, someone whose amazement at what is happening is as real as their own.
Give them that, and you have given them what no amount of technique, no number of effects, and no polished persona can replicate.
Give them yourself.