For the first couple of years that I was performing, every piece of feedback I received pointed in the same direction: be more of a showman. Project more energy. Smile bigger. Engage the audience harder. Work the room. Be dynamic. Be entertaining. Be a showman.
So I tried. I watched performers who were known as great showmen and tried to absorb what they did. The big gestures. The vocal variety. The constant energy. The ability to fill a room with personality. I practiced projecting enthusiasm. I practiced theatrical reveals. I practiced the art of seeming larger than life.
And it worked, to a degree. My performances got more energetic. The audience responded more visibly. I got more applause, more laughter, more of the surface-level indicators that a show is going well. I was becoming a better showman.
The problem was that the performances still felt hollow to me. I could not articulate why. On paper, everything was improving. The reactions were better. The energy was higher. The shows were more entertaining. But something was missing — some quality that I could sense in the performances I admired most but could not find in my own, no matter how much showmanship I piled on.
Then I read a sentence in Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic that stopped me cold: “Showmanship is a cheap substitute for drama.”
The Sentence That Reframed Everything
I must have read that sentence five times before I fully processed what it was claiming. Showmanship — the very thing I had been told to develop, the thing I had been practicing and improving for months — was not just insufficient. It was a substitute. And not even a good one. A cheap one.
Brown’s argument, once I sat with it, was not that showmanship is useless. It was that showmanship and drama are fundamentally different things, and most magicians pursue the former while completely ignoring the latter. Showmanship is the external projection of energy, personality, and entertainment value. Drama is the internal architecture of tension, stakes, cause, and resolution. Showmanship is how you present something. Drama is what makes it worth presenting.
The distinction hit me hard because it explained exactly what I had been feeling. My performances had showmanship — energy, engagement, personality. What they lacked was drama. There was no tension. There were no stakes. There was no sense that something was at risk, that the outcome mattered, that the audience should be emotionally invested in what was about to happen. I was entertaining, but I was not dramatic. And without drama, all the showmanship in the world was just decoration on an empty building.
What Drama Actually Means in Magic
In theatre, drama requires certain elements: characters the audience cares about, a situation with stakes, conflict or tension that builds, and a resolution that feels both surprising and earned. These are not optional components. They are the structure that makes theatrical experiences meaningful. Without them, you have spectacle — things happening on stage that are visually interesting but emotionally inert.
Most magic, if we are honest, is spectacle. Things happen. Cards change. Coins vanish. Predictions are revealed. The audience is impressed by the impossibility, and the showman’s energy carries them through the gaps between impossibilities. But the underlying experience is a series of unconnected demonstrations: look what I can do, look what I can do, look what I can do.
Drama in magic means something different. It means creating a sense that the outcome of what you are doing actually matters — to you, to the spectator, to the room. It means building cause and effect into the performance so that each moment feels like it leads to the next rather than just following it. It means introducing tension, uncertainty, even the possibility of failure, so that when the impossible moment arrives, it lands with emotional weight rather than just intellectual surprise.
The Missing Ingredient: Cause
Brown makes a specific argument about cause and effect in magic that I found particularly illuminating. Most magic deals only with effect. The magician snaps his fingers and the card changes. But why did it change? How did his intention become reality? What is the connection between the snap of the fingers and the transformation of the card?
In most magic, there is no answer to these questions because most performers never even ask them. The snap is just a signal — a theatrical convention that means “the magic happens now.” It has no causal relationship to the effect. It is an arbitrary gesture that triggers an impossible result, and the audience knows it is arbitrary, which is why they respond with intellectual curiosity (“How did he do that?”) rather than emotional investment (“Something just shifted in this room”).
Drama requires cause. It requires the audience to feel, even if they cannot articulate it, that there is a reason the impossible thing happened. Not a literal explanation — not “I used energy from the quantum field” or whatever pseudoscientific framing some performers employ. Rather, a felt sense that the performer did something, invested something, risked something, and the result is connected to that investment.
This is the difference between a card change that feels like a puzzle and a card change that feels like a moment. The puzzle version is: the card was the seven, he snapped his fingers, now it is the queen. Impressive. The dramatic version has something before the change — a build-up, a sense of effort or concentration, a feeling that the performer is reaching for something and it might not work — and the change, when it comes, feels like the resolution of that reaching. It feels earned.
Why Showmanship Is the Easy Path
I understand now why I defaulted to showmanship instead of drama. Showmanship is easier. It is external. It is about energy and personality and projection — things that can be practiced in front of a mirror, measured in audience response, and turned up or down like a volume knob. When a performance feels flat, the showmanship fix is straightforward: more energy, bigger gestures, louder personality.
Drama is harder. It is internal and structural. It requires rethinking the architecture of your effects, not just the energy with which you present them. It requires asking uncomfortable questions like: why does this trick exist? What is at stake? Why should the audience care about this particular moment? Is there any tension, any uncertainty, any risk in what I am doing — or is the outcome guaranteed from the moment I begin?
These questions do not have easy answers, and the answers cannot be applied from the outside. You cannot add drama to a trick the way you can add energy. Drama has to be built into the structure of the effect and the presentation from the ground up.
My Own Reckoning
When I went through my set with this lens — showmanship versus drama — the results were uncomfortable. I had pieces that were high in showmanship and almost zero in drama. Big energy, enthusiastic delivery, good audience interaction, but no tension, no stakes, no sense that the outcome mattered to anyone in the room. The audience was entertained, but they were not moved. They were watching a show, but they were not inside an experience.
I had one piece in particular that I thought was one of my strongest: lots of audience interaction, good laughs, a clean and surprising climax. But when I asked myself where the drama was — where the tension lived, where the stakes were, where the audience should feel something more than amusement — I could not find it. It was pure showmanship. A well-performed demonstration of something impossible, presented with charm and energy. But dramatically, it was flat. There was no arc. There was no build. There was no moment where the audience held their breath.
Fixing it required more than adjusting my delivery. It required redesigning the piece. I had to find the dramatic question inside the effect — the moment where something genuinely felt uncertain — and restructure the entire presentation around that question. I had to create a reason for the audience to care about the outcome before the outcome arrived.
The new version has less showmanship. The energy is more contained. The delivery is quieter in places where it used to be loud. But the audience response is different in a way that matters. Instead of applause at the climax, there is a beat of silence — that suspended moment where the impossible registers not as a puzzle but as something felt. Then the applause comes, and it comes from a different place. Not appreciation for cleverness. Something closer to relief, or wonder, or the release of tension that has been building without the audience quite realizing it.
The Spectrum of Performance
I do not think showmanship is bad. I think it is insufficient on its own. The best performers combine showmanship and drama seamlessly. They have personality and energy and presence, but they also have structure and tension and cause. The showmanship makes the performance enjoyable. The drama makes it meaningful.
The worst performances have neither. Flat delivery and no dramatic structure — just a person doing tricks mechanically.
The next tier has showmanship but no drama. These are the entertainers — energetic, engaging, likable. The audience has a good time. But nothing lingers. Nothing changes. The experience evaporates the moment it ends.
The highest tier has both. These are the performers who leave audiences genuinely shaken, genuinely moved, genuinely feeling that something happened to them rather than in front of them. They are showmen, yes — but that showmanship is in service of something deeper. It is the vehicle for drama, not a replacement for it.
The Practical Question
The question I now ask about every piece in my repertoire is not “Is this entertaining?” but “Is this dramatic?” Is there tension? Is there something at stake, even metaphorically? Is there a build from uncertainty to resolution? Is there a reason — a cause, a connection, a through-line — that makes the impossible moment feel earned rather than arbitrary?
If the answer is yes, showmanship can amplify it. If the answer is no, all the showmanship in the world will not make up for the absence.
Showmanship is a cheap substitute for drama. It took me longer than it should have to understand that sentence. But understanding it changed what I practice, what I prioritize, and what I reach for when I step in front of an audience.