I need to talk about a section of Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians that made me uncomfortable when I first read it. Not uncomfortable in the way that a challenging idea makes you uncomfortable — the productive kind, the kind that means you are learning something. Uncomfortable in the way that encountering outdated assumptions makes you uncomfortable — the kind that makes you want to put the book down and check the publication date.
The section was about women-only audiences. Fitzkee, writing in 1943, had specific advice for performing to an all-female crowd. Some of that advice was a product of its time and belongs there. But some of it, I realized on reflection, was surprisingly and uncomfortably applicable. Not because the assumptions about women were correct, but because the underlying principles about audience psychology were correct and had been expressed through the lens of the era’s prejudices.
Separating what Fitzkee got wrong from what he got right is an exercise worth doing, not because it rehabilitates the wrong parts, but because it illuminates something important about how our assumptions about any audience can both help and mislead us.
What He Said
Fitzkee’s advice for women-only audiences included several specific prescriptions. Use colorfully decorated properties. Remove the puzzle element from the magic. Eliminate spectator volunteers. Avoid vulgarity. The impression one gets from reading the passage is of a performer tiptoeing around an audience he considered delicate, easily confused, and primarily interested in aesthetics rather than substance.
The language is patronizing. The assumptions are gendered in ways that feel antiquated even by the standards of a few decades later. And if you read the passage at face value, the message is: women cannot handle the same magic men can, so simplify and prettify.
I put the book down after that section and did not pick it up again for two days. When I did, I forced myself to do something that my consulting background makes habitual but that my personal reaction had initially prevented: I separated the conclusions from the reasoning and evaluated each independently.
What He Got Wrong
The most obvious thing Fitzkee got wrong was the gendered framing itself. The assumption that “women-only audiences” constitute a meaningfully different psychological category from “men-only audiences” or “mixed audiences” does not hold up to modern understanding of human psychology. Cognitive abilities, attention patterns, emotional responses, and engagement with magic are not meaningfully different between genders. The research in cognitive psychology and the neuroscience of attention and perception simply does not support the idea that you need a fundamentally different approach based on the gender composition of your audience.
His advice to “remove the puzzle element” from magic performed for women implies that women are less interested in intellectual engagement, which is demonstrably false. His advice to “eliminate spectator volunteers” implies that women do not want to participate, which is equally unsupported. And his advice about “colorfully decorated properties” implies that aesthetic presentation matters more to women than to men, which is a stereotype rather than an observation.
These are not minor errors. They are the product of a worldview that sorted people into categories based on gender and then assigned those categories fixed characteristics. That worldview was common in 1943. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now.
What He Got Right — But for the Wrong Reasons
Here is where it gets interesting, and where I had to set aside my initial reaction and think carefully.
Some of Fitzkee’s specific advice, divorced from its gendered rationale, points toward legitimate performance principles.
“Use colorfully decorated properties.” If you strip the gendered reasoning away, this is simply: invest in the visual quality of your props. Make them attractive. Make them interesting to look at. This is good advice for any audience. Visual appeal is one of Fitzkee’s own audience appeals from his master list, and it applies universally. The mistake was not in recommending visual quality but in implying that only female audiences require it.
“Remove the puzzle element.” If you strip the gendered reasoning away, this connects to one of Fitzkee’s most important principles: the puzzle is the weakest form of magic. He argues throughout the book that bewilderment and puzzlement are mind appeals, not instinct appeals, and that instinct appeals are stronger. His advice to remove the puzzle element from women-only audiences was patronizing in its reasoning but pointed toward a universal truth: magic that relies primarily on “how did they do that?” is weaker than magic that produces emotional responses. This is true for every audience, not just women-only ones.
“Avoid vulgarity.” Again, if you strip the gendered reasoning away, this is simply: know your audience and do not include material that will alienate them. This is audience management, and it applies to every performance. The mistake was not in recommending sensitivity to the audience’s preferences but in assuming that all women share the same preferences about what constitutes vulgarity.
“Eliminate spectator volunteers.” This one is harder to extract a universal principle from, and I think it is mostly just wrong. But there is a kernel of something in it: in certain audience contexts, the social dynamics around volunteering are different, and the performer needs to be sensitive to those dynamics. In some corporate settings, for instance, there is immense social pressure not to volunteer because appearing foolish in front of colleagues has professional consequences. This has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with social context. But the underlying awareness — that the willingness to volunteer is not a fixed human trait but a contextual one — is legitimate.
The Real Lesson
The most valuable thing I extracted from wrestling with Fitzkee’s women-only audience section was not about gender at all. It was about the danger of audience assumptions.
Fitzkee was, in many ways, remarkably advanced in his understanding of audience psychology. His taxonomy of eleven audience types is sophisticated and largely still useful. His insistence that the performer must adapt to the audience rather than demanding the audience adapt to the performer is one of the most important principles in all of performance theory. His analysis of attention, interest, and emotional response is grounded in genuine observation and practical experience.
And yet, when it came to gender, his observations were filtered through the assumptions of his era so thoroughly that they produced advice that is partly useless and partly harmful. He was looking at real audiences and seeing real things. But he was interpreting what he saw through a lens that distorted the interpretation.
This is a warning, and it applies to me as much as to anyone. Every performer brings assumptions to their reading of an audience. I assume things about corporate audiences based on my experience in the corporate world. I assume things about Austrian audiences based on being Austrian. I assume things about age groups, professional backgrounds, energy levels. Some of those assumptions are useful — they help me prepare appropriately and adapt effectively. But some of them are as wrong as Fitzkee’s assumptions about women, and I may not be able to see which is which because I am looking through my own lens.
The Audience of One Category
What I have learned from performing for many different types of audiences — including audiences that were predominantly or entirely women, at corporate women’s leadership events, at women’s networking functions, at events where the gender composition was explicitly part of the organizing principle — is that gender is one of the least useful categories for predicting audience behavior.
The factors that actually matter are context, energy, and expectation. A group of women at a corporate leadership retreat in Salzburg behaves like a corporate leadership retreat audience. They are attentive, analytical, responsive to intelligence, and initially reserved. A group of women at a casual networking event in Vienna behaves like a casual networking event audience. They are social, energetic, responsive to humor, and immediately warm.
The gender did not predict the behavior. The context did.
This is true, I have found, across Fitzkee’s taxonomy. The meaningful differences between audiences are not demographic. They are situational. A group of engineers at a team-building event is different from a group of engineers at a formal conference, and the difference is not about who they are but about the situation they are in.
The most useful version of Fitzkee’s taxonomy is one where the categories are defined by situation rather than identity. Formal versus informal. High-energy versus low-energy. Attentive versus distracted. Sober versus drinking. Large versus small. Familiar with each other versus strangers. These situational categories predict audience behavior far more accurately than any identity-based category.
Updating the Framework
I have taken Fitzkee’s eleven audience types and quietly reformulated them in my own notes. My version removes the identity-based categories (men-only, women-only, specific age groups) and replaces them with situational descriptions. I do not categorize by who the audience is. I categorize by what the audience situation is.
High-formality, high-attention audiences — corporate boards, leadership teams, academic groups. These audiences are reserved, analytical, and slow to warm up. They reward intelligence and subtlety. They punish anything that feels lightweight.
Low-formality, high-energy audiences — holiday parties, celebration events, social gatherings. These audiences are warm, reactive, and forgiving. They reward energy and humor. They punish anything that feels slow or self-important.
Small, intimate groups — dinner tables, cocktail circles, casual encounters. These audiences want conversation, not performance. They reward naturalness and personal connection. They punish anything theatrical.
Distracted audiences — any situation where alcohol, noise, competing activities, or social dynamics are pulling attention away from the performer. These audiences need bold, visual, fast material. They punish anything that requires sustained concentration.
Captive versus voluntary audiences — whether the audience chose to be there or was required to be there. Captive audiences are harder to win over but more grateful when you do. Voluntary audiences are easier to engage but have higher expectations.
Each of these categories tells me something useful about how to prepare and what material to select. None of them require me to make assumptions about who the audience members are as people.
The Humility Lesson
Writing about Fitzkee’s errors is easy. Identifying my own is harder. But the exercise of seeing how a brilliant, experienced, deeply observant performer could be so wrong about one specific audience category has made me more cautious about my own assumptions.
Every time I prepare for a performance and think I know what this audience wants, I try to check that assumption against the evidence rather than against my expectations. Have I performed for an audience like this before? What actually happened, not what I expected to happen? Is my assumption based on observation or on stereotype?
I do not always succeed. I am sure I carry assumptions I cannot see, biases I have not yet examined, expectations that are based on pattern-matching rather than evidence. Fitzkee could not see his own bias about women. I probably cannot see some of mine.
But the awareness that the bias exists — the knowledge that my reading of an audience is always filtered through my own lens, and that the lens is never perfectly clear — makes me a better performer. It makes me more curious about each specific audience. It makes me more responsive to what is actually happening in the room rather than what I assumed would happen. It makes me more likely to adapt and less likely to force.
What Survives
After all of this analysis, what survives from Fitzkee’s section on women-only audiences?
The gendered framing: discard it entirely. The specific prescriptions based on gender: discard them. The implication that any audience category based on identity requires a fundamentally different approach: discard it.
What survives is the principle underneath: every audience is specific, and the performer who assumes they can deliver the same show to every group is the performer who will fail with most of them. The principle of adaptation. The principle of observation. The principle of meeting the audience where they are rather than where you assume them to be.
These principles are Fitzkee at his best. They are what makes his work valuable eighty years after publication. And the fact that he sometimes applied these principles through an outdated and biased lens does not invalidate the principles themselves. It just means that every generation of performers has to do the work of applying those principles through their own lens — and then questioning whether that lens is any clearer than the one that came before.
Fitzkee got some things wrong about women-only audiences. He got the important things right about all audiences. And the process of separating the two taught me something about my own assumptions that I value more than either the right answers or the wrong ones.
The most useful thing a flawed framework can teach you is how to recognize the flaws in your own.