After nearly 20 years of working with Jeff McBride and Marco Tempest, not only as manager but also as director, producer, sometimes as a lighting designer and even helping out with the writing of their performance pieces, I came to realize that there was a real need and hunger from magical performers for a firmer grounding in the basics of the theater arts. Since I had trained as actor, director and designer, and worked for many years on the production and management teams for some of the world's great theatrical productions, I found myself in position of having something unique to share.  Thus, back in 2005 - 2007, I set out to write the book that was to become Beyond Deception: The Theory and Technique of Creating Original Magic.  The book is a compendium of exercises drawn from my theater training, but redesigned to help magicians. There are exercises is creating original material, on building up your performance abilities, and much more. Since it's release in 2007, the book sold out it's initial printing of 2000, and I am now working to release a trade paperback and Kindle copy through Amazon CreateSpace.

 

Over the past several years, Jeff McBride and the staff of his "McBride Magic & Mystery School" have been producing and presenting a weekly program over streaming video (@ mcbridemagict.tv). Each week we would examine a different subject, and each one of us would produce a short video segment in which we discussed that week's subject. Over the course of nearly 3 years, we've produced well over 100 episodes.  I called my segments "The Wizard's Corner," and it is from those segments that Beyond Deception, Volume 2: From the Wizard's Corner has been drawn. Originally written as scripts to be delivered on camera, I've gone through and revised each of them, sometimes expanding or cutting the original scripts, and doing my best to make them more readable. The result is a series of essays divided into the following broad sections:  On Being a Magician, Varieties of Magic, On Performing as a Magician, History, Creating Material, Gigging, and The Business of Magic.  A bit of something for everyone -- unless you want to learn new magic tricks. This is not a book teaching tricks. It is a book on making the magic you present better by making it more meaningful and more entertaining.

 

Please feel free to browse the exerpts from each book provided here, and to watch the sample videos "From the Wizard's Corner" that you'll find with the Excerpts from Volume 2. If you like what you read, click the links below to buy your copies, either on paper or in Kindle format, directly from Amazon.

 

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