There is an acting principle that I first encountered in Pete McCabe’s interview with Jonathan Levit in Scripting Magic, and it changed the way I perform more than almost anything else I have learned. It goes like this:
One of Levit’s acting teachers was in a show where three scenes were happening simultaneously on stage. During one of the scenes, a bagel accidentally got hurled into another scene. The actors in that second scene just went about their business, as if there were no bagel. They ignored it completely. And Levit’s point was simple and devastating: don’t ignore the bagel.
If something happens in your world — anything, whether planned or unplanned, whether convenient or catastrophic — you have to respond to it. You cannot pretend it did not happen. You cannot continue with your script as though reality has not just interrupted you. You have to acknowledge what happened, react to it, and then decide what to do. Because that is what a real person would do. And audiences can always tell the difference between someone who is present in the moment and someone who is robotically executing a sequence.
I read this principle on a train between Vienna and Salzburg, and by the time I reached Salzburg I had already identified three moments in my own performances where I was ignoring bagels.
The Revelation I Rushed Past
The most damning example came from a video that Adam Wilber had recorded of me performing at a corporate event in Vienna. This was about a year into my performing journey, and I was doing a mentalism piece — a prediction routine where the audience’s choices would align with something I had written before the show began.
The routine worked exactly as designed. The choices were made. The prediction was revealed. It matched perfectly. And in the video, what I saw myself do was this: the prediction matched, I showed it to the audience, and then — within approximately three seconds — I moved on to set up the next phase.
Three seconds. For a miracle.
I had just shown an audience that I apparently knew what they were going to choose before they chose it. The prediction was sealed. The choices were free. Everything matched. This is, if you take the premise seriously for even a moment, an impossible event. And I treated it like checking off an item on a to-do list. Prediction shown. Check. Moving on.
When Adam pointed this out to me, I initially did not understand the problem. “But the routine has three phases,” I said. “I need to get to the next one.”
“The audience is not thinking about the next phase,” he said. “They are still processing the thing that just happened. And you have already left them behind.”
He was right. I was ignoring the bagel. The magical moment — the thing that had just happened — was a bagel that had landed in my scene, and I was stepping over it to get to my next mark.
Why We Do This
The reason performers rush past their own magical moments is, paradoxically, familiarity. You have rehearsed this routine hundreds of times. You know the prediction matches. You have seen it match in practice, in rehearsal, in the mirror in your hotel room, and in dozens of performances. The outcome is not surprising to you. It is expected.
But it is not expected by the audience. For them, this is the first time. The revelation is genuinely surprising. And in that moment of surprise, they need time. They need time to register what happened. They need time to feel the emotion of it. They need time to look at the people around them and confirm that yes, that really just happened. They need time to applaud, to gasp, to laugh, to whisper “How did he do that?”
If you move immediately to the next phase, you are communicating something terrible: this is not remarkable. If the performer himself does not find this moment worthy of pause, why should the audience?
The bagel principle is not just about responding to unexpected events. It is about responding to the expected ones too. When something extraordinary happens in your performance — even if you planned it, even if you have seen it a thousand times — you must respond to it as though it matters. Because if you do not respond, the audience takes their cue from you, and they stop responding too.
The Four Bagels Every Magician Faces
I have come to think of there being four categories of bagels in a magic performance, and most performers are ignoring at least two of them.
The first is the magical moment itself. This is the one I was ignoring in that Vienna performance. The card changes, the prediction matches, the thought-of object is revealed. This is the moment the entire routine has been building toward, and too many performers treat it as a transition point rather than a destination. You have to land on the moment. Stay with it. Let it breathe. React to it, even if your reaction is simply allowing silence to fill the room.
The second is the audience’s reaction. When something astonishing happens and the audience gasps, that gasp is a bagel. It has landed in your scene. You cannot ignore it. You have to see it, feel it, and respond to it. Some performers I admire will pause and actually look at the faces in the audience, letting the reaction wash over them. Others will smile, or nod, or say something simple like “I know, right?” The specific response matters less than the fact that you are acknowledging what is happening in the room.
The third is the unexpected disruption. Someone’s phone rings. A glass breaks. A child shouts something. A volunteer says something funny or strange. These are the most obvious bagels, and surprisingly, they are the ones most performers handle best. Because when something goes visibly wrong, the audience’s eyes are on you, and the pressure to respond is immediate and obvious. You cannot pretend a phone did not ring when everyone heard it. You have to deal with it.
The fourth is the quiet anomaly. This is the subtlest and most commonly ignored bagel. It is the moment when something slightly unexpected happens — a card falls out of the deck, a volunteer hesitates when you expected them to respond immediately, a joke does not land as well as it usually does, the lighting shifts, the music cue comes in a beat late. These small disruptions are easy to ignore because the audience may not even notice them consciously. But you noticed them. And if you continue as though nothing happened, a tiny crack appears in the reality of your performance. You are no longer fully present. You are executing a script in spite of reality rather than in response to it.
What Responding Actually Looks Like
When I started consciously applying the bagel principle to my performances, I had to figure out what responding actually looked like in practice. Because the answer is not to stop the show every time something happens. The answer is to let each moment register.
For the magical moment: I now build pauses into my routines at every revelation point. Not long, dramatic pauses — those can feel artificial. But deliberate moments of stillness where I allow the effect to land. I look at the result. I look at the audience. I let the moment exist before I move to what comes next. Sometimes this takes three seconds. Sometimes it takes ten. The right duration depends on the magnitude of the moment and the energy of the room.
For the audience reaction: I practiced the skill of receiving applause and reaction without deflecting it. This was harder than it sounds. My instinct, as someone who comes from business rather than performing, is to deflect positive reactions. To say “thank you” quickly and move on. To minimize. This is appropriate in a business meeting. It is fatal in a performance. When the audience reacts, I now let the reaction complete itself before I continue. I do not talk over applause. I do not rush past laughter. I wait, and I let them feel what they are feeling.
For disruptions: I developed a handful of genuine responses — not scripted lines, but genuine emotional reactions — that I can deploy when something unexpected happens. If a phone rings during a quiet moment, I might pause, look in the direction of the sound, and then say something that acknowledges it without punishing the person. The point is to be real. A real person would notice. A real person would react.
For quiet anomalies: This is where the real work lives. I started building what I call “internal registration” into my rehearsals. When I practice a routine and something does not go perfectly — a card does not spread as cleanly as usual, my timing is slightly off on a line — I practice noticing it, registering it internally, and then either incorporating it or releasing it. The goal is to be so present during the performance that nothing goes unnoticed, even if most of what I notice is invisible to the audience.
The Video Review That Changed Everything
After that initial conversation with Adam, I started recording every performance I could. Not for the purpose of reviewing technique or checking whether effects were working. For the purpose of watching my reactions.
I would watch the footage with the sound off, just watching my face and body language. Where did my attention go? Where did my energy drop? Where did I look like I was thinking about the next phase instead of living in the current one?
The pattern was clear. Every time something happened — a revelation, an audience reaction, an unexpected moment — there was a tiny gap. A half-second where my face went blank as I shifted internally from “that just happened” to “what comes next.” That gap was the bagel-ignoring moment. That was where I was leaving the present to visit the future.
I worked on closing that gap. Not by eliminating the internal shift — you do need to know what comes next — but by staying in the moment just a beat longer before making the shift. By letting the reaction complete, the moment land, the audience process, before I began the transition.
The difference was noticeable almost immediately. Not to me during the performance — I was too busy performing to notice. But on the recordings, the performances where I held the moments longer were simply better. The audience reactions were bigger because I was giving them space. The transitions felt smoother because the audience had finished processing before I moved on. The overall energy of the show was higher because the peaks were actually being experienced instead of being rushed past.
The Practice Room Application
Here is something I discovered that I think is useful for anyone who practices alone, as I often do in hotel rooms across Austria. You can practice the bagel principle even when there is no audience.
When I run through a routine in my hotel room in Graz or Innsbruck, I now practice reacting to the magical moments as though they are genuinely surprising. This feels absurd the first few times. You are alone in a room, showing a card to nobody, and then reacting as though something remarkable has occurred. It looks ridiculous if anyone were watching.
But it builds the muscle. It creates the habit of pausing at revelations, of registering moments, of allowing effects to land. When you have rehearsed the reaction a hundred times in private, the reaction during performance is not manufactured — it is automatic. You have trained your body and your face to stay present at the moment of the effect, and that training kicks in when the spotlight is on.
The Bagel Is the Show
Here is what I have come to believe: the bagels are the show. Not the tricks. Not the script. Not the choreography. The moments when something happens and you respond to it — those are the moments the audience remembers. The gasp. The laugh. The unexpected comment that gets a bigger reaction than your best line. The silence after a revelation that stretches just long enough for the impossibility to sink in.
If you ignore those moments, you are ignoring the best parts of your own show.
Jonathan Levit said it with characteristic simplicity: don’t ignore the bagel. Respond to what happens. Be present. Be real. Let the moments land.
It is the simplest acting principle I have ever encountered, and the hardest to consistently apply. But every time I catch myself rushing past a revelation or talking over a reaction, I hear those three words in my head.
Don’t ignore the bagel.