When I started building my stage show, one of the first questions I had to answer was how long it should be. It sounds like a simple question. It is not. The answer determines everything else — how much material you need, how many routines you develop, how you structure your opening and closing, how you pace your audience participation, and how you think about the show as a whole.
I asked other performers and got a range of answers that was more confusing than helpful. Some said start with fifteen minutes and build from there. Others said you need at least an hour to be taken seriously. One person suggested I just perform until I ran out of material and see where that landed me.
Then I read John Graham’s recommendation in Stage By Stage: aim for a forty-five-minute show as your baseline.
Forty-five minutes. Not fifteen. Not sixty. Not some vague “however long feels right.” A specific number, and one that is larger than most people would guess for a first stage show.
That recommendation changed how I approached the entire project. Here is why.
The Fifteen-Minute Trap
The instinct most of us have when transitioning from close-up to stage is to start small. Build a short set. Get comfortable with fifteen or twenty minutes. Then expand from there. This sounds logical, and in some ways it is. You cannot run before you walk.
But there is a problem with the short-set approach that I did not understand until I tried it. A fifteen-minute set is not a miniature version of a forty-five-minute show. It is a fundamentally different type of performance with different structural demands, different pacing requirements, and a different relationship with the audience.
When you have fifteen minutes, you cannot build a relationship with the audience. You barely have time to establish who you are before you need to move into your strong material. There is no room for the personality piece — that moment early in the show where the audience gets to size you up, where you show them the person behind the performance. There is no space for variety in tone, for peaks and valleys, for the oscillation between comedy and emotion that keeps a modern audience engaged. You are essentially performing a highlight reel.
Graham makes this exact point. If you need a shorter spot — a fifteen- or twenty-minute set — you should develop a separate show with its own structure. Extracting pieces from your regular show will feel disjointed, he says, “rather than an act with a sense of structure.” The short set is its own discipline. It is not a stepping stone to the longer show.
This was a revelation for me. I had assumed that I would build from the bottom up — start with a few routines, add more, gradually expand the running time until I had something substantial. But that approach produces a fundamentally different kind of performance than designing a forty-five-minute show from the outset.
Why Forty-Five Minutes Works
Here is what I discovered about the forty-five-minute target when I actually committed to it.
First, it forces you to think about structure. When you have forty-five minutes to fill, you cannot just string together a series of unrelated effects. You need an opening that establishes your presence and gets to the magic quickly. You need a middle section with enough variety to keep the audience engaged over a sustained period. You need a closing that feels like a resolution, not just the last trick you happened to have. You need transitions between pieces that are entertaining in their own right, not dead time where you fumble with props.
In short, forty-five minutes forces you to build a show, not just a collection of tricks. And the discipline of building a show — thinking about flow, about pacing, about the emotional arc of the audience’s experience — is the essential skill you are developing when you make the transition to stage.
Second, forty-five minutes gives you room to breathe. In a fifteen-minute set, every second is precious and every moment carries the weight of the entire performance. One flat joke, one awkward transition, one piece that does not land, and a significant percentage of your set is compromised. The margin for error is tiny.
In a forty-five-minute show, you have breathing room. A piece that lands soft can be compensated for by a piece that lands hard. An awkward moment can be recovered from because there is time to rebuild momentum. The audience forgives small imperfections when the overall experience is rich and varied.
This breathing room is especially important when you are new to stage performing. You are going to make mistakes. You are going to have pieces that work differently on stage than they did in close-up. You are going to discover that your timing needs adjustment, that your volume needs recalibration, that your physical gestures need to be larger than what felt natural at a dinner table. All of these discoveries happen in real time, during live performance. Having forty-five minutes instead of fifteen gives you the space to make these discoveries without the entire performance being derailed by any single one of them.
Third, forty-five minutes is a commercially viable length. This is the practical reality that does not get discussed enough in the theoretical literature. When you are booked for a corporate event, a conference, a private function, the standard expectation for a featured entertainer is somewhere between thirty and sixty minutes. Forty-five minutes puts you comfortably in that range. It is long enough to feel substantial, short enough that it does not overstay its welcome, and flexible enough that you can extend or compress slightly based on the audience’s energy and the event’s schedule.
When I started getting booked for keynote-adjacent performances through Vulpine Creations, the standard ask was for something between thirty and forty-five minutes. If I had built my show around a fifteen-minute core with the intention of expanding later, I would have been scrambling to fill the required time. By building to forty-five minutes from the start, I had the material to meet the demand.
The Enviable Problem
Graham makes a prediction that I found hard to believe when I first read it: eventually you will face the enviable problem of not knowing what to take out.
When I was in the early stages of building my show, this seemed impossible. I was struggling to assemble enough material for forty-five minutes. Every routine felt essential because I needed every one of them to fill the time. The idea that I would someday have too much material was laughable.
And then, gradually, it happened. As I performed the show and developed new routines through live testing, as jokes accumulated and bits developed organically from audience interactions, as I found ways to extend strong material and cut weak material, the show grew. New pieces demanded inclusion. Old pieces earned their place through audience response. The running time crept up.
The moment I realized I needed to cut material rather than add it was a turning point. Not because the cutting was easy — it was agonizing — but because it meant the show had reached a level of maturity where quality control was the priority, not quantity. I was no longer asking “Do I have enough?” I was asking “Is this the best possible version of this show?”
That shift in question is the difference between a performer who is filling time and a performer who is crafting an experience. And it only becomes possible when you build to a substantial target from the beginning.
The Middle Is Where You Live
One thing I underestimated when I started building to forty-five minutes is how important the middle section of the show would become. The opening gets the attention. The closing gets the applause. But the middle — that twenty-five to thirty minutes between your first effect and your final sequence — is where you actually live as a performer. It is where the audience gets to know you. It is where the relationship develops. It is where the peaks and valleys happen.
Graham talks about needing many middle routines early on. As jokes, lines, and bits develop over time, the number of tricks you need in the middle decreases because each piece gets richer and longer through performance. A routine that takes four minutes when you first build it might take seven or eight minutes after a year of performing, not because you added more magic to it but because the comedy, the audience interaction, the organic moments that develop from flight time all expand the piece naturally.
This was exactly my experience. My early shows were packed with routines because each one was relatively lean — the core effect plus minimal presentation. As I accumulated flight time, each piece grew. Comedy bits developed. Callback opportunities emerged. Audience interaction moments got longer and more organic. The show needed fewer routines to fill the same forty-five minutes because each routine was doing more work.
Building It Wrong, Then Building It Right
I should be honest about the fact that my first forty-five-minute show was not good. It was not terrible, but it was not good. The structure was clunky. The transitions were awkward. The pacing was uneven. Some pieces that worked beautifully in close-up fell flat on stage. Other pieces that I had included as filler turned out to be the strongest moments in the show.
None of this was apparent from rehearsal. All of it was apparent from the first few live performances.
This is the paradox of building a stage show: you have to build it before you know how to build it. The forty-five-minute target gives you the framework. The live performances give you the information. And then you rebuild, and rebuild again, and keep rebuilding.
My first version had eight routines crammed into forty-five minutes. My current version has five core routines that fill the same time, because each one has been expanded and enriched by hundreds of performances. The show got smaller in terms of routine count and larger in terms of depth.
Why Not Sixty Minutes?
A reasonable question is why not aim for sixty minutes from the start. If forty-five is good, is more not better?
For a first stage show, sixty minutes is too much. Not because you cannot physically fill the time, but because the quality control becomes impossible. When you are new to stage performing, you are learning so many things simultaneously — physical presentation, vocal projection, audience management, stage blocking, prop management, timing, pacing — that maintaining quality across sixty minutes is unrealistic. The last fifteen minutes of an hour-long show by a new performer are almost always the weakest, because fatigue and accumulated small mistakes compound.
Forty-five minutes is the sweet spot. It is long enough to feel like a complete experience, short enough to maintain quality throughout, and demanding enough to force you into real show construction. Once you have a strong forty-five-minute show, expanding to sixty is a matter of adding one or two routines that you have already tested. The foundation is solid.
The Number Is the Commitment
Looking back, I think the most valuable thing about the forty-five-minute target was that it represented a commitment. Not a vague aspiration to “build a stage show someday” but a specific, measurable goal. Forty-five minutes of material, structured as a show, ready to perform.
That commitment forced me to make decisions I would otherwise have postponed. Which routines to include. What order to put them in. How to open. How to close. What kind of music to use. What transitions to write. These decisions are the substance of show construction, and without the pressure of a specific target, I would have procrastinated on all of them.
Graham writes: “Work diligently on your show. Do not fall victim to paralysis by analysis. If you keep waiting until you’re ‘ready,’ you never will be.” The forty-five-minute target is the antidote to paralysis. It gives you something concrete to build toward, and the building itself teaches you things that no amount of planning can.
Start with forty-five minutes. Build the structure. Perform it live. Discover what works and what does not. Rebuild. Perform again. The target is the commitment, and the commitment is what transforms a collection of tricks into a show.