What Is A Good Magic Trick Opener

I do these online consultancy calls with corporate magicians. I love the variety; every performer brings with them their own sensibility and a totally different market. Each one ends up with their own bespoke acts and shows.

Some conversations do get repeated. One that I end up having most often concerns the idea of the perfect opening trick.

It seems odd to say this, but why is there not a trick that is universally accepted to be the perfect opener for magicians? We're all in agreement about which tricks are great closers, it seems, but openers – the answer is less clear.

The Goal Of An Opener

A lot of people assume an opener needs to say a lot about who you are as a performer. In many ways, I couldn't agree less. You can do that with trick number two – for me, there's something more important to do first than introducing who you are as a person.

Make them feel okay, put them at ease, trust you, let them realize that they're in safe hands, and get them to commit to enjoying the show.

I've written before about how Luis de Matos once told me to think of an opening trick as your "Lion King" moment—a chance for you, as he says the Lion King musical does, to give your audience their money's worth in the first five minutes. I like this way of thinking, but I'm not sure you need to go so big.

Seeing a competent performer do a brilliant trick is enough for people to realize that they can sit back and relax—they're going to get their money's worth and enjoy the rest of the show.

I've also noted in the past how impressed I was by the way Tom Crosbie introduces himself and the show early on in his act. His ability to reassure the audience and put them at ease was something I truly felt echoing around the room.

Most people have never seen a magic show before, and they certainly do not know what to expect. I think until you tell them or show them, they're going to be spending the whole show trying to work out what they're watching instead of sitting back and enjoying it.

When I watched Derek DelGaudio's In & Of Itself live in New York, it was not immediately clear what the show was for the audience. You could feel people trying to work it out for the first twenty minutes or so. Even when it ended, a couple next to me began discussing whether they thought Derek was a magician or an actor and whether the show was about him.

This was surely a structural decision on DelGuardio's part. But I thought that it was interesting that I felt something totally different when I saw the recorded version on Disney Plus. If I remember correctly, there's an open camera trick at the top of the show where the audience appears in their seats as the shot passes behind DelGuardio – something about this moment and the intro put me to ease immediately as a viewer – okay, I get it, this is one of those things where I should suspend my disbelief and enjoy the show as a piece of art.

For many years, Derren Brown and his creative team began all of his live shows with a game that involved the entire audience. Go back to his early live specials, and you'll see they all start with everyone standing up and playing "which hand," guessing which shoebox has the shoe in it, and so on.

The decision to begin the show came from a desire for a "buy-in"—how can we get everyone involved and participating immediately?

Many performers have since replicated Derren's opening game format.

Interestingly enough, as Derren evolved as a performer and became more famous, the rule of starting his shows with a game shifted to starting his shows with a story. In recent years, his shows often began with a small monologue, drawing us into the show in a much more intimate way.

It's difficult to know how necessary the games were early in his show career. Maybe he promoted himself from doing them because he became famous enough not to need such a buy-in. Or he became a much more comfortable performer on stage and didn't need a game for himself to play.

For most performers, though, performing at corporate engagements where individual audience members did not book tickets to see you perform – while I don't think I would blanket recommend a game, there is something to say about feeling like you involve everyone straight away.

Something fast, with three or so audience members making decisions that are revealed straight away—that's my blanket recommendation. Of course, different performers might benefit from doing things differently – one of my favourite openers that was devised recently on a consultancy call wasn't even a trick, and I think it is truly terrific.

One thing to note is that using multiple audience members to narrow down a card selection has to be done carefully. The energy you create by getting three people in the audience to make decisions is entirely undone if the audience thinks you're just dragging out a decision one person would make.

I look around at audiences and can feel this sense of time being wasted—we all know the first person could have just said the king of spades; we didn't need three people to help make the decision. Your framing and anchoring of the effect can solve this. Tell the audience you want this to be a group decision on behalf of the whole audience, etc. 

Mortenn Christiansen has likely published the best off-the-shelf opener that fits this brief. He only seems to sell it at conventions for a complete bargain. He calls it The Jumbo Five of Hearts Trick.

Some Openers for You

I've spent the last week toying with the idea of great openers that also pack small and play big. I've tried to follow the idea of multiple spectators making decisions with an easy payoff quite narrowly.

They're not all winners, but they'll inspire more ideas.

Performer's Contract

You walk on stage and announce that you need the audience's help coming up with your first trick. (You can tell how I had this idea.)

Then, you get multiple spectators in the audience to stand up one by one and describe the next stage of an impossible magic trick. You make a note of them on a pad, recapping every stage of the trick before the next spectator describes their proposed phase.

You'd likely guide the audience, coming up with a trick that involves a chosen object from a certain location appear on stage and do something magical.

When you have your new trick idea, for example, "making a rhino from a zoo in Belgium appear on stage then float into the air," – you realize you have a problem.

"I can't perform this trick! I signed a performing contract with this venue before the show, and contractually. Unfortunately, I cannot perform this trick."

You take out the printed contract in an envelope from your jacket, insisting you're telling the truth, and invite the final spectator involved in the trick's creation up onto the stage to verify.

Showing the audience the printed performing agreement, as well as where you signed it and the venue's owner signed it too – you ask the person on stage to read clause 23.4, which reads as follows.

"Certain tricks are not to be performed at the venue. Under no circumstances during the performance can the magician perform a magic trick in which they make a rhino from a zoo in Belgium appear on stage then float into the air."

The Method: double writing. The notepad you hold at the start of the trick has a secret window leading all the way inside the brown envelope inside the notepad. This allows you to write the trick into the correct section of the contract while also "keeping track of the trick" for the audience members during its creation process.

Tear off the top page and return the notepad to your inner pocket – when retrieving the contract, only pull out the brown envelope from within the pad. Remove it from the envelope and show the audience the printed sections – only the spectator on stage will know that the prediction section is handwritten, but it remains impressive to them, too – you can make this feel more natural to them by referring to the clause as something added in last minute.

This method is inspired by an Anthony Owen trick.

Balloons

I love this idea.

You walk on stage with as many colored balloons as you can carry. The first spectator in the audience names one, and you throw it to them. The second spectator does the same, and so on. You eventually have to ask spectators to help you pass the balloons further back to get to the spectators the furthest away.

After handing out the four or five balloons, you're left with one – let's say it's the orange balloon. You make your little intro speech and then let go of the balloon, and it floats up to the ceiling – it was the only one filled with helium.

The Method: An invisible thread reel pulls the final balloon to the ceiling, so the balloon is a free choice. You stick the end of the thread to the final balloon during the performance.

You could also achieve this with actual helium inside one balloon and the use of equivoke. With six balloons, three under each arm, the first person chooses right or left—drop one side to the floor or keep hold of the side they choose. Then, you transfer the single helium balloon to the other hand and ask a second spectator to choose left or right—drop the two balloons or keep the one helium balloon.

If travelling with helium or thread is too tricky, I also enjoy the concept of a souvenir balloon—one that you turn around to reveal has "they always end up with this balloon" printed on the back—and then give it away.

I also toyed with the idea of building an ice pick that can release confetti. The final balloon gets popped and appears like you filled it with confetti. Something tells me that this won't look so amazing and that a better method might involve a clever way of attaching the confetti to the back of the final balloon such that when you burst it, the confetti comes from there and not the ice pick – this method would be closer to the classic method used to make predictions and chosen card appear in balloons.

The Frisbee

You come onto the stage with what you announce is a specially designed frisbee for magicians. It's designed for selecting audience members, so it has a slight bounce, but it still will hurt if it hits you directly in the face, so look out!

You throw it around to select three spectators who make three decisions. There's no thematic guide to what the decisions might be (unlike with the balloons and the contract idea above).

The final spectator joins you on stage with the frisbee, and you explain that it really is specially designed for magicians. Genuinely! You designed it yourself; in fact, you actually got the factory to add something special to its back.

You retrieve a magnifying glass and hand it to the spectator. When they read the engraved fine print on the inside of the frisbee, it's a perfect match for the decisions the audience has just made freely.

The Method: A circular piece of plastic is retrieved when you get the magnifying glass, and it clicks into place magnetically to the inside of the frisbee. The line around the written prediction appears as if it's etched out of it, too, and part of the design. For this, I would make a decision with every out prepared in the place where you retrieve the magnifying glass. Or I would have an assistant off-stage engraving the piece with a portable engraver and placing it with the magnifying glass on a tray for you to grab as the audience member joins you on stage.

When thinking of this idea, I also quite enjoyed the image of a black frisbee with a small prediction envelope taped to the underside of it. I like that some people will spot it as it is thrown around, and I like how clear of an image it is when you hold it up on stage. When the spectator joins you on stage, have them sit on a chair and switch the frisbee behind it as you pull it forward (an assistant writes in the final envelope and places it and the frisbee on the back of the chair as they bring it onto the stage moments earlier.

If you'd like the clean image of a card inside of the envelope. I really love the simplicity of creating a duplicate of the underside of the frisbee, complete with a second envelope stuck onto it, which can be clicked into place or magnetized up into the frisbee that returns onto the stage. This can happen when you place it down momentarily on a table, music stand, your stage case, or even as it passes alongside something like a notepad or a chair.

Or, we could do a full circle and use a practical method much closer to Mortenn's. You perform the trick holding a jumbo deck of playing cards, dropping handfuls of cards as audience members eliminate them. What the audience doesn't know is that on the backs of each of these cards, camouflaged by the back design, are 52 envelopes with their corresponding regular playing cards inside of them. These envelopes are designed to be slightly bigger than the ones on the underside of the frisbee, mitigating the need for them to line up perfectly when they magnetize to the underside of the frisbee and cover the original envelope.

In practice, that'll likely mean each "out" sits within a small cutout pouch in the back of the jumbo cards. Due to their design, you can flash both sides. When the spectator comes on stage, you only need to hold the jumbo selected card in front of the frisbee for the envelope to engage. It would probably look quite clean.

Let me know if you enjoyed any of these ideas enough for me to make them. Having just finished the magic book, I'm in the mood to make a small batch of something for members as we've done in the past.