My first thirty-minute show was, to be blunt about it, a pile.
Not a bad pile. The individual effects were decent. I had rehearsed them in hotel rooms across Austria until I could execute them reliably. But when I strung them together and performed the set for the first time at a private corporate event in Vienna, something was clearly wrong. The audience enjoyed individual moments. They reacted to individual effects. But between those moments, something kept resetting. Every time I finished one piece and moved to the next, I could feel the audience’s engagement drop to zero before rebuilding from scratch.
It was like watching a television show where every scene was from a different series. Each scene might have been well-produced, but the experience of watching them back to back was disorienting and exhausting. By the end of the set, the audience was not energized. They were fatigued. Not from boredom — from the effort of reorienting themselves every three minutes.
I did not have a show. I had a sequence of tricks performed by the same person in the same room. The person and the room were the only connecting threads, and they were not enough.
When I read Dariel Fitzkee’s chapter on unity in Showmanship for Magicians, I understood what had been missing. Fitzkee argues that every act must be bound together by a unifying idea from beginning to end. Unity is what separates a “specific, identifiable entity” from what he memorably calls a “nondescript miscellany.” And he identified multiple techniques for creating that unity, each one a different way to bind disparate elements into something that feels whole.
Here are eight ways to do it, drawn from Fitzkee’s framework and filtered through my own experience of rebuilding that first show from a pile into a performance.
1. Theme
A theme is the conceptual thread that runs through every piece in your set. It is the answer to the question: what is this show about?
My first show was not about anything. It was about card tricks, then mentalism, then a prop effect, then more mentalism. The only theme was “magic,” which is not a theme at all — it is a category.
When I rebuilt the set, I chose a theme that connected to my actual life: the gap between what we think we know and what is actually true. Every effect in the revised set explored some dimension of that gap — false certainty, unreliable memory, the illusion of free choice, the difference between what you see and what happened. The theme gave me a framework for selecting material, writing transitions, and building toward a conclusion that felt like it resolved something rather than simply ending.
A theme does not need to be profound. It needs to be consistent. A show about “lucky objects” is a theme. A show about “the impossible things we take for granted” is a theme. A show about “what I learned from hotel rooms” is a theme. The specifics matter less than the fact that every piece in the set connects to the same central idea.
2. Character
Fitzkee was emphatic about character as a unifying device. If you maintain a single, consistent character throughout your entire act — the same attitude, the same way of speaking, the same way of relating to the audience, the same emotional tone — the act holds together because the person performing it holds together.
This is the unity device I rely on most heavily. My character on stage is not dramatically different from who I am off stage — an analytical person who is genuinely surprised by the things he has discovered about perception and the mind. I approach each effect with real curiosity, not with the showman’s stance of “watch what I can do.” That consistency of character creates a through-line that connects everything, even when the effects themselves are quite different from one another.
Fitzkee cited Cardini as a master of character-based unity. Every element of Cardini’s act — the slightly tipsy gentleman surprised by the cards that keep appearing in his hands — was bound together by that character. The individual effects were subordinated to the character. The character was the show. Everything else was in service of that central persona.
You do not need a theatrical character to use this device. You need a consistent way of being on stage. Whatever version of yourself you present to the audience, maintain it from the first moment to the last. If you are funny at the beginning and serious at the end, the audience spends energy adjusting to the shift. If you are consistently you — whatever version of “you” that is — the audience relaxes into a relationship that deepens throughout the set.
3. Costume
This is the simplest and most visual form of unity, and it is the one most often overlooked by performers who think costumes are just clothes.
When everything you wear is visually coordinated — when your shirt, jacket, and accessories create a coherent visual impression — the audience unconsciously perceives unity before you perform a single effect. You look like a single entity rather than a random collection of garments. That visual coherence extends to how the audience perceives your act.
I learned this from practical experience. Early on, I performed in whatever I happened to be wearing at the event — usually a business suit that was appropriate for the corporate context but not particularly deliberate as a performance choice. When I started thinking about my appearance as a design decision rather than a default, choosing specific colors, specific fits, specific accessories that contributed to a visual identity, the audience’s initial response shifted. They perceived me as a performer before I performed anything. The costume told them: this is one thing, one coherent entity, not a miscellaneous collection.
4. Music
A consistent musical identity ties everything together in a way that operates below conscious awareness. If the same musical theme or mood accompanies your entire set, or if specific musical motifs return at key moments, the audience feels continuity even when the visual content changes.
I use music sparingly in my performances — more in keynote contexts where I have more control over the technical setup, less in close-up or informal settings. But when I do use it, I have learned that musical consistency matters enormously. A single piece of background music that runs underneath the entire set creates a completely different feeling than a different song for each effect. The first feels like a show. The second feels like a playlist.
Fitzkee pointed out that the formula for a good music arrangement mirrors the formula for a good act: attention-getting opening, varied pace, and a punch closing. Music is not decoration. It is structural.
5. Prop Consistency
If every effect in your set uses a different type of prop — cards, then ropes, then coins, then silks, then a box — the visual variety works against unity. Each new prop requires the audience to recalibrate. But if you use related objects throughout, or if the same materials keep reappearing in different contexts, the props themselves become a unifying element.
Fitzkee mentioned Ade Duval’s “Rhapsody in Silk” as an example — an entire act built from silk productions, where the consistency of the material created a visual identity that audiences remembered. You do not need to limit yourself to one prop to use this principle. You can use related objects, objects from the same category, or objects with a consistent visual aesthetic.
In my own set, most of my effects involve either cards or paper — written predictions, envelopes, notecards, business cards. This was not originally a deliberate choice. It was a consequence of my background in card magic and my move into mentalism, both of which involve a lot of paper and card stock. But I have come to appreciate how the visual consistency of these materials creates subtle unity. The audience does not consciously think “he keeps using paper.” But they do feel a coherence to the set that would be absent if I were switching between radically different types of props.
6. Running Gags
A running gag is a comedy element that returns multiple times throughout a set, usually with escalating absurdity or an unexpected payoff at the end. It is one of the strongest unity devices available because it creates anticipation. The audience starts watching for the gag’s return, which means they are tracking a thread that connects separate moments of the show.
I have a small running bit in my set that is not quite a gag but functions similarly — a recurring reference to my own certainty being wrong, a callback structure where I set up something I am confident about and then discover I was mistaken. It returns in different forms throughout the show. By the third occurrence, the audience anticipates it. They start looking for it. That anticipation is a thread that connects everything, invisible but strong.
Running gags work because they reward attention. The audience member who remembers the first occurrence and catches the callback feels clever. That feeling of cleverness creates engagement that carries through the entire show.
7. Narrative Thread
A narrative thread is a story that begins at the start of your set and resolves at the end, with the individual effects functioning as chapters or episodes within that story.
This is the most ambitious unity device and the hardest to execute well. When it works, it is transformative. The audience is not watching a series of tricks. They are following a story, and each trick advances the story toward a resolution they are genuinely invested in.
I have experimented with this approach in my keynote work, where the magic serves the narrative rather than the other way around. The keynote has a central argument — something about innovation, perception, or decision-making — and the magic effects illustrate and advance that argument. The narrative gives the audience a reason to care about what comes next, beyond the standalone interest of each individual effect.
Narrative threads require careful scripting and rehearsal. The story needs to be compelling enough to sustain interest across the full length of the set. The effects need to feel like they belong within the story rather than being wedged in as demonstrations. And the resolution needs to pay off the narrative promise you made at the beginning.
8. Escalating Structure
This is the most fundamental unity device, and in some ways, it underlies all the others. An escalating structure means that each moment in your set is more impressive, more surprising, or more emotionally intense than the last. The audience feels constant forward motion, constant rising energy, building toward a climax that delivers the biggest moment of the entire performance.
Fitzkee compared this to a staircase — always forward, always rising. No plateaus. No steps backward. No repetition of energy level. Every moment must carry interest higher and closer to the climax.
In practical terms, this means your weakest material goes near the beginning and your strongest material goes at the end. It means you resist the temptation to open with your best effect, no matter how impressive it is. It means you think about the emotional trajectory of the entire set, not just the quality of individual pieces.
I now map the emotional intensity of every effect in my set on a rough scale and arrange them in ascending order. If two effects are at the same level, I either cut one or find a way to differentiate them so one is clearly a step above the other. The audience should never feel like the show has plateaued.
The Multiplier Effect
Here is what Fitzkee understood and what took me much longer to learn: these eight devices are not alternatives. They are layers. One method of unity is good. Many methods binding together consistently is, in Fitzkee’s word, superlative.
When your set has a theme, a consistent character, a coordinated visual identity, musical continuity, prop consistency, running callbacks, a narrative thread, and an escalating structure — when all eight devices are working simultaneously — the unity is so strong that the audience cannot separate the individual elements. They do not see tricks, transitions, and stories. They see a show. A single, coherent experience that began at a specific moment, took them on a specific journey, and arrived at a specific destination.
That is the difference between a pile and a performance. I know because I have been on both sides of it. The pile was hard work performed with sincerity. The performance was the same hard work, the same sincerity, but with eight invisible threads binding everything together into something the audience could hold in their mind as a single thing.
A single thing is memorable. A pile is forgettable. And the choice between them is not about talent or technique. It is about architecture. About deliberately designing the connections that transform a collection of individual moments into a unified experience.
Fitzkee laid out the blueprint. The construction is up to you.