The disaster happened in Innsbruck. It was a corporate event — a technology company’s annual leadership retreat, about eighty people, nice venue, good sound system. I had been booked to do a twenty-minute magic segment as part of the evening program.
I arrived on time. I was wearing a good suit. I had rehearsed the material thoroughly. I was confident in my tricks, my script, my pacing. Everything I thought mattered was in order.
Except for one thing. When I went to set up my props backstage, I realized I had left a critical item in my hotel room — a small but essential piece of my mentalism closer. Without it, the entire final sequence would not work. I had forty-five minutes until showtime and a twenty-minute drive back to the hotel.
What followed was the most frantic, undignified scramble of my performing life. I raced back to the hotel, found the piece, raced back to the venue, set up with shaking hands, and went on stage with my heart rate somewhere around 150 and zero of the calm, confident energy I had planned to project.
The show was adequate. Not bad. But adequate is the word you use when something that should have been great was merely okay. The audience had a fine time. I felt like I had narrowly survived a car crash.
That night, back in my hotel room, I opened Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians and turned to his section on check charts. What I found was a system so thorough, so obsessively detailed, that it would have prevented not just my Innsbruck catastrophe but a dozen other near-misses I had experienced without even recognizing them as problems.
The Seven Checklists
Fitzkee organizes show-day preparation into seven distinct checklists, each targeting a different aspect of the performance. Together, they cover everything from weeks before the show to the post-mortem afterward. Here is how I adapted them for my own work.
Checklist One: Audience Appeals
This is the master list — Fitzkee’s catalog of every possible audience appeal: music, rhythm, movement, personality, color, comedy, surprise, character, conflict, spectacle, emotion, and dozens more. The checklist asks: how many of these am I incorporating into this specific show?
I do not run through this checklist on show day itself. I use it during the development phase, weeks or months before a performance. It is a brainstorming tool, not a day-of tool. I print the list and go through it item by item, asking whether each appeal is present in my act and, if not, whether it could be.
The value is in the prompts it provides. Without the list, I would never think to ask “Does my act include rhythm?” or “Is there any element of nostalgia?” With the list, each item triggers a creative question. Not all of them apply. But every time I go through it, I find two or three additional appeals I can weave into the performance.
Checklist Two: Act Idea
This checklist covers the conceptual foundation of the act. What is the character? What tricks are included and why? Who is the target audience? What is the running time? What is the emotional arc?
I use this checklist whenever I am building or significantly modifying a show. It forces me to articulate decisions that I might otherwise make unconsciously. Writing down “The character is an analytical consultant who is genuinely surprised by magic” makes the character concrete. Writing down “The emotional arc goes from curiosity through skepticism to astonishment” gives me a trajectory to build toward.
The most useful question on this checklist, for me, is about audience targeting. Who specifically will be in this room? Not “a corporate audience” — that is too vague. What industry? What seniority level? What mood will they be in by the time I go on? What have they been doing all day? The answers shape everything from material selection to language to pacing.
Checklist Three: Routine
This is the operational checklist — the one that would have saved me in Innsbruck. It covers every physical element of the performance:
Where is each prop before the show? Where will it be during each trick? Where does it go after it is used? Which hand holds what, and when? What are the exact words at each moment? What music plays, and at what volume? What are the lighting cues? What is the timing for each section?
I now have a document for every show that maps every prop to a specific location — case, pocket, table, preset position on stage. Before I leave for the venue, I check every item against this list. Before I set up, I check again. Before I go on stage, I check a third time.
It sounds obsessive. It is obsessive. And it has eliminated the category of disaster that hit me in Innsbruck. When you know exactly where everything is and exactly where it needs to be, there are no surprises. The surprise happens to the audience, not to you.
Checklist Four: Performance Day
This is the show-day checklist proper — everything that needs to happen from the moment I wake up to the moment I walk on stage:
Clothing pressed and inspected. Shoes polished. Every item of wardrobe checked for stains, loose buttons, wrinkles. Fresh shirt. Clean hands. Nails trimmed and clean — this matters more than you think when you work with cards and close-up props on stage.
Props packed according to the routine checklist. Music loaded and tested. Backup files on a separate device. Batteries checked in any electronic props. Backup batteries packed.
Arrive early — minimum one hour before showtime. Meet the event organizer. Walk the venue. Check the stage, the lighting, the sound system. Do a sound check. Identify where the audience will be sitting. Determine where you will set up your props. Find the nearest electrical outlet. Locate the bathroom. Identify the path from backstage to the performance area.
This last detail — the path to the stage — is something I never thought about until a show in Klagenfurt where I had to walk through the dining area, past the kitchen entrance, around a pillar, and up three steps to reach the stage. I nearly tripped on the steps. Now I walk the path during setup, every time, so my body knows it before the adrenaline kicks in.
Checklist Five: Sound, Music, and Tech
I split this off from the general performance checklist because technology deserves its own dedicated review. The number of things that can go wrong with sound, music, and electronic equipment is staggering, and every one of them will be obvious to the audience.
Sound check completed with a live voice test, not just playback. Monitor levels set so I can hear myself. Music cues tested from start to finish — not just the first track, but every track, every transition, every volume change. Backup audio source ready in case the primary fails.
If using a lavalier microphone: cord routed properly, pack secured, batteries fresh, no rustling from clothing. If using a handheld: tested for dead spots, volume matched to my natural speaking level.
This checklist has saved me more than once. At a conference in Vienna, the sound check revealed that the venue’s wireless frequency conflicted with my microphone’s frequency, creating intermittent static. We caught it during setup and switched to a different channel. If we had not done a thorough sound check, that static would have appeared during the performance, and there would have been no fix.
Checklist Six: Post-Performance Evaluation
This is the checklist I run after the show, usually within an hour. It covers:
What worked? Specifically — which moments got the strongest reactions? Where did the audience lean forward? Where did they laugh? Where did they gasp?
What did not work? Which moments fell flat? Where did energy drop? Where did I feel the audience disconnect?
Were there any technical issues? Sound problems, lighting issues, prop malfunctions, forgotten lines?
What was the audience’s energy at the end? Were they wanting more, or were they ready for it to end?
What would I change for the next performance?
I write these notes by hand, in a small notebook I carry to every show. The physical act of writing forces me to be specific. “The second effect was weaker than expected” becomes “The second effect got a polite reaction instead of the strong response I expected — possible causes: the setup was too long, the audience was not yet fully engaged, or the effect does not contrast well enough with the opener.”
Checklist Seven: Continuous Improvement
This is not a show-day checklist. It is a rolling document that I update after every evaluation. It tracks patterns across multiple performances:
Which effects consistently get strong reactions? These are keepers. Which effects are inconsistent — strong with some audiences, weak with others? These need diagnosis. Which effects consistently underperform? These need to be cut or redesigned.
Are there recurring technical problems? (For me, the answer was yes: I kept having issues with a particular prop that was unreliable in certain weather conditions. After three failures across different shows, I retired it.)
Is the show getting tighter or looser over time? Are my timings becoming more precise or more sloppy? Am I adding material without cutting, causing the show to expand beyond its optimal length?
This checklist is where the strategic thinking comes in. Individual show evaluations tell you what happened. The continuous improvement log tells you what is trending. And trends are what you need to see if you want to actually get better over time rather than just repeating the same level of performance.
The System in Practice
I will not pretend that I run all seven checklists in their full form for every show. For a quick close-up set at a networking event, the routine and performance-day checklists are usually sufficient. For a major keynote or a formal stage show, I use all seven.
The point is not rigid adherence. The point is that the system exists. When I am under pressure — when the stakes are high, when the venue is unfamiliar, when the event organizer is nervous and their anxiety is becoming my anxiety — I do not have to rely on memory or instinct. I have a process. And a process eliminates the kind of catastrophic oversights that turn a confident performer into a panicking one.
What the Checklists Actually Provide
Fitzkee believed that the purpose of exhaustive preparation was to free the conscious mind entirely for the performance itself. When every logistical detail has been checked and confirmed, you do not spend mental energy wondering whether your props are in the right place or your batteries are fresh or your suit has a stain. That mental energy is available for what actually matters: connecting with the audience, reading the room, being present.
This is the paradox of checklists. They seem mechanical, even soulless. Lists and boxes and yes/no confirmations feel like the opposite of artistic expression. But the artists who do their best work are almost always the ones who have systematized everything that can be systematized, so that the only thing left for the moment of performance is the art itself.
Pilots use checklists before every flight. Surgeons use them before every operation. These are life-and-death applications. Magic is not life-and-death. But the principle is identical: when the stakes are high and the pressure is on, you do not want to be the person relying on memory.
You want to be the person who checked the list.
After Innsbruck, I became that person. The scramble, the racing heart, the barely-adequate show — that was the last time I walked into a venue without a checklist. Seven checklists, adapted from a magician who wrote them in 1943. The technology has changed. The props have changed. The venues have changed. The human tendency to forget critical details under pressure has not changed at all.