I had a total blast talking magical illusions and non-illusory theater with local magician Andrew Evans for Wolfman New Life Quarterly Issue 2. Check it out in print or online.
And this brings us to the two audiences that are awful at magic shows. Children under a certain age are a terrible audience; they don’t know what’s impossible, and everything is already magic to them. More surprising to me, Andrew tells me that people who are high can be good at seeing through a trick. “For folks who are stoned, their mind is going, I’m just gonna get lost in this, the world is magic, right? But that’s actually when you start figuring it out. I’m designing these tricks with the knowledge that people are trying to figure them out. So the second somebody’s not in that mindset, they’re not picking up those cues, and then they’ve arrived at a completely different—and sometimes accurate—conclusion that no one else has.”
