There is a moment in every great performance where you can feel the machinery clicking into place. Not the secret machinery of the magic — the visible machinery of the production. The lights shift at exactly the right moment. The music swells precisely as the performer reaches the climax. The assistant moves to the correct position without being asked, and the prop is exactly where it needs to be, and the timing is so precise that the entire sequence feels inevitable rather than constructed.
That is what Fitzkee was talking about when he identified what I think of as the production appeals: Physical Action, Group Coordination, and Precise Attack. These are not about the content of your performance. They are about the execution. The craft of making everything happen at the right moment, in the right way, with the right energy. And they are far more important than I ever would have guessed before I started studying showmanship seriously.
When I read Fitzkee’s “Showmanship for Magicians,” these production-level appeals initially seemed like concerns for large-scale stage shows — the kind of productions with crews, assistants, and technical teams. I was a solo performer doing mentalism at corporate events. What did group coordination have to do with me?
Everything, as it turned out.
Physical Action: The Appeal of Doing
Fitzkee placed physical action among his thirty-nine appeals because audiences are inherently drawn to watching people do things. Not think things, not talk about things — do things. Physical activity creates visual interest, communicates energy, and engages the audience’s mirror neurons in a way that purely verbal performance cannot.
This is one of magic’s built-in advantages over many other forms of entertainment. Magic involves doing. Objects are manipulated, produced, vanished, transformed. There is inherent physical action in the art form. But many magicians — and I was one of them — undermine this advantage by minimizing the physicality of their performance.
My early mentalism performances were almost entirely verbal. I would talk, the spectator would think of something, I would reveal it. The effect was strong, but the physicality was negligible. I was essentially having a conversation that happened to end with an impossible revelation. The mental action was significant, but the physical action was close to zero.
When I started deliberately incorporating physical action into my mentalism — writing predictions on whiteboards, handing envelopes to spectators with deliberate ceremony, dramatically tearing up cards, physically moving to different parts of the stage — the energy of the performances changed. The effects were the same. The methods were the same. But the audience engagement was measurably higher because there was something to watch, not just something to listen to.
Physical action also communicates commitment and effort. When an audience sees a performer physically investing in a moment — moving with purpose, handling objects with care and deliberation, using their whole body rather than just their voice — they perceive a performer who is working for them. That perception of effort and investment creates reciprocal engagement. If the performer is giving everything, the audience feels compelled to give their attention in return.
I now evaluate every effect in my repertoire with the question: where is the physical action? If the answer is “there is not much,” I look for ways to add it. Not gratuitous movement, but purposeful physical engagement that adds visual interest and communicates energy.
Group Coordination: The Power of Ensemble
This is the appeal I initially dismissed as irrelevant to my work. Group coordination — the spectacle of multiple people working in perfect synchronization — seems like a concern for dance troupes and theater companies, not for a solo mentalist performing at a keynote.
But Fitzkee’s insight about group coordination is broader than it appears. It is not only about having a team on stage. It is about the visible coordination of multiple elements — human, technical, and environmental — working in precise alignment. And every performer, even a solo performer, is coordinating multiple elements.
When the music cue hits exactly as you deliver your key line, that is coordination. When the lighting shifts at the precise moment the reveal happens, that is coordination. When the volunteer’s actions and your actions and the audience’s attention all converge on a single moment, that is coordination. And the audience perceives this coordination, even when they cannot articulate what they are perceiving. It registers as professionalism. As competence. As the invisible sign of someone who has done the work.
I learned this lesson from watching performers at a magic convention in Blackpool that Adam Wilber and I attended for Vulpine Creations. The acts that hit hardest were not necessarily the ones with the most impressive effects. They were the ones where every element — music, lighting, movement, timing, prop management — was in perfect synchronization. The coordination itself was thrilling. You could feel the precision. And that precision communicated something beyond the content of the tricks: it communicated mastery.
For my own keynote performances, I have started treating the technical elements — music cues, slide transitions, lighting changes — as ensemble members. They have their cues. They have their timing. And when they hit their marks correctly, the overall effect is one of coordinated precision that elevates the entire performance above the sum of its parts.
Precise Attack: The Art of Hitting the Mark
Fitzkee used the term “precise attack” to describe something specific: the quality of executing with clean, decisive certainty. No fumbling. No hesitation. No visible uncertainty about what comes next. Every action arriving at exactly the right moment with exactly the right force.
This is perhaps the hardest production appeal to develop, because it requires the kind of unconscious competence that only comes from extensive rehearsal. You cannot have precise attack if you are thinking about what comes next. You can only have precise attack if your body knows what comes next and your mind is free to sell the moment.
Fitzkee was uncompromising on this point. He prescribed rehearsing the entire act from beginning to end, three to four times per session, every day, until you could go through it without mistakes, until you were thoroughly sick of it, until the mechanics were entirely subconscious. Only then could you achieve precise attack — the quality of every element arriving at the same place at the same time with clean, inevitable certainty.
I have experienced both sides of this. I have performed pieces that were under-rehearsed, where I was thinking about what came next instead of being present in the current moment. The audience could tell. Not because I made visible mistakes, but because the quality of attack was soft. Uncertain. The timing was approximate rather than precise. The transitions were functional rather than clean. The overall impression was competent but unremarkable.
And I have performed pieces that were thoroughly drilled, where my body knew every movement and every cue and my mind was completely free. The difference is striking. The timing becomes precise. The transitions become invisible. The energy becomes concentrated and focused. And the audience responds to that precision with a level of attention and respect that imprecise execution never earns.
The Boxing Analogy
Fitzkee used a vivid analogy for precise attack that I think about regularly. He compared the build toward a climax to a boxer sensing a knockout. “Every pug in the fight game knows how to go after a knockout once it is in sight. Wade in and slug. Keep slugging, harder and harder until the knockout comes.”
What he meant was that the final moments of an effect — the moments leading into the climax — should be executed with increasing force and precision. Not faster, necessarily. But more concentrated. More decisive. Each action hitting harder and cleaner than the last, building an unstoppable momentum toward the punch.
I have adapted this principle for my mentalism work. In the moments before a reveal, I deliberately sharpen my execution. My voice becomes more precise. My movements become more deliberate. My timing becomes tighter. The effect is a visible increase in concentration and commitment that the audience reads unconsciously as significance. Something important is about to happen. The performer’s precision is telling them so.
This is not a natural instinct for most performers. The natural instinct, especially under the pressure of a live audience, is to rush the climax. To get through it quickly before something goes wrong. To mumble the key line and move on. Precise attack requires the opposite: slowing down, sharpening up, and delivering the most important moment with the most careful execution.
Rehearsal as the Foundation of All Three
What connects physical action, group coordination, and precise attack is that all three require rehearsal to achieve. Not practice — rehearsal. Fitzkee drew a clear distinction between the two. Practice is learning the mechanics. Rehearsal is running the complete performance, from beginning to end, exactly as it will be performed for an audience.
Most magicians practice. Very few rehearse. They practice individual moves and effects in isolation but rarely run their complete act from beginning to end, with music, with staging, with all the transitions and timing that the actual performance requires. This is like a musician who practices scales but never plays the complete piece from start to finish.
I was guilty of this for a long time. I would practice individual effects until they were solid, then string them together for the performance and hope that the transitions would work themselves out. They did not work themselves out. They were always the weakest part of the performance — the moments where the physical action faltered, the coordination broke down, and the precision of the attack dissolved.
Now I rehearse. Full run-throughs, from my walk-on to my exit, including all music cues, all transitions, all audience interaction points. I do this in hotel rooms, in empty conference halls before events, in my apartment when no one else is home. It feels repetitive and sometimes absurd — standing in a hotel room in Innsbruck, talking to an imaginary audience, going through every beat of a thirty-minute set. But the absurdity of the rehearsal is what creates the precision of the performance.
The Production Difference
The production appeals are what separate a performance from a presentation. When physical action, group coordination, and precise attack are all working, the audience watches a performance. When they are missing, the audience watches someone doing tricks.
This distinction matters enormously in the corporate keynote world where I operate. My audiences are professionals who attend dozens of presentations every year. They know what a presentation looks like. It looks like someone standing at a podium with slides, talking at a medium pace, delivering information competently but without particular physical energy or precision.
When I walk on with music, move with purpose, handle my materials with deliberate physicality, coordinate every element with clean timing, and deliver every moment with precise attack, the audience immediately perceives that this is not a presentation. This is a performance. And that perception shifts their engagement from the polite, semi-attentive mode they use for presentations to the active, fully-engaged mode they use for experiences.
Fitzkee understood this in 1943. The content of your performance matters, but the production quality of your performance determines whether the content lands. Physical action, group coordination, and precise attack are the production appeals that transform content into experience.
The Standard You Are Competing Against
There is a final point from Fitzkee that I want to land clearly, because it changed my perspective fundamentally. He argued that your competition is not other magicians. Your competition is the best entertainers in every field. Film. Television. Live theater. Stand-up comedy. Music. The audience in your room has seen the best production values in the world, delivered through screens into their living rooms. That is the standard they are unconsciously comparing you to.
When your physical action is minimal, your coordination is approximate, and your attack is imprecise, you are not competing against other magicians who might be equally sloppy. You are competing against the last Marvel film, the last Netflix special, the last concert your audience attended. Those productions had perfect coordination. Perfect precision. Explosive physical action.
You cannot match their budget. But you can match their commitment to precision. You can ensure that every element of your performance — every movement, every cue, every moment of execution — is as precise and coordinated as you can make it. And when you do, you are playing in the same league as the entertainment your audience is accustomed to. When you do not, you are reminding them that magic is amateur hour.
Fitzkee would have said that last sentence differently — he would have said it more bluntly and with less concern for anyone’s feelings. But the point stands. The production appeals are not optional embellishments for performers who have the luxury of assistants and technical crews. They are fundamental requirements for anyone who wants to be taken seriously as a performer, regardless of whether they are performing for ten people at a dinner table or ten thousand people in an arena.
Physical action. Group coordination. Precise attack. These are the appeals that turn tricks into theater. And theater is what audiences pay to see.