Why you should NOT hire a strolling magician!

The only thing worse than not hiring a strolling magician when you should, is hiring one when you definitely shouldn’t! If you don’t know the reasons, learn them now!

What is a strolling magician?

You likely have already seen this at a party, a corporate event, or even on TV. The simplest definition: a strolling magician interacts with people in small groups in a mingling setting rather than onstage. It’s much more of an informal style of entertainment. Something you might see at a cocktail party for a wedding or corporate event. Starting out as a magician in North Carolina, I personally spent the first 14 years of my career doing strolling magic in restaurants around Charlotte.

Strolling magic also goes by other names, such as walk around magic, mix & mingle, or mingling magic. Probably the most popular alternate name…street magic. That term became much more universal after David Blaine broke onto the scene. It may be no surprise that people became much more interested in strolling magic after the success of his TV shows.

Why is strolling magic a good thing?

I’ve said this for years. A good strolling magician may be the single greatest form of entertainment at an event. There really isn’t another form of entertainment with such a high level of interaction that evokes such a big response.

If you have a room full of guests, and the average person attending only knows a handful, the proverbial “ice breaking” is much harder. A good strolling magician doesn’t just have people interacting with him, but also with each other.

Good strolling magic can literally be the best entertainment money can buy, all while giving your guests something unexpected to talk about…with people they’ve never met.

Why should you NOT hire a strolling magician?

Yes, there are reasons and they are big ones! After performing in multiple restaurants every week for the first 14 years of my career, and now doing strolling magic for high-end weddings and major corporate conferences, I’m just reporting the facts.

1. Size of the audience:

This should always be your starting point. It’s going to be the foundation of other reasons I give you. My rule of thumb has always been, “no less than 75-100 people per hour of strolling magic.” Once a few screams come from a group, a crowd will gather…and nothing draws a crowd better than a crowd. The smaller your guest list, the more likely it is to have the majority, if not all of your attendees gather around the magician.

Why is this bad? If the magician performs for the majority of your guests in the first 15 minutes, the likelihood is that you paid for a great 15 minute show…and 45 minutes of a magician having nothing to do. Now, some magicians will have a backup plan. On several occasions, when a smaller than expected group showed up, I’ve converted a strolling event I was doing into a show, on the fly.

However, if you’re having just 30 people at a house party, the majority of professional magicians will not do just walk around. They will either recommend doing an actual show, or they will just turn down the event.

At a minimum, have 75-100 people per hour of walk around magic. It’s ok to have too many people. It’s never ok to have too few. The worst thing that can happen is to have a great magician be there for one minute too long.

2. Grand opening…the drop-in:

These requests don’t come in too frequently, but we still get them. Someone is having a grand opening, or an open house, or a meet & greet. Basically, they’re having an event where people are filtering in and out the whole time. That’s not automatically a bad thing. I’ve done quite a few of these events that went really well. The problem is, when people are dropping in for an unknown amount of time, there’s no way to estimate how many people will be there at any given moment. So at best, you’re basing when to have a magician on your best guess of people’s collective schedule.

If you’re having 100 attendees filtering in and out, but your event is four hours long, the total number of attendees doesn’t matter. That means, you could have a strolling magician to close out the last hour of the night, and 75% of your attendees have already come and gone. This puts us right back at the first reason…size of the audience.

If you’re doing a grand opening and want a magician to mingle with your attendees, I would recommend doubling my per hour recommendation. Take the total number of attendees and divide by the number of hours. If you don’t get 150-200 per hour, I would recommend not booking a magician. I say this only because early in my career, I did several grand openings where people said, “It’s a three hour event and we’ll have 200 people there.” I got booked for the last hour and nearly everyone had been and gone in the first two hours.

One thing you can do (which I always recommend to my clients) is make a big announcement about the entertainment and give them a specific time to be there. My clients will typically say, “Bryan Saint will be here at 7pm and he’s fooled Penn and Teller twice on TV! Then they’ll send out a link to my Videos. Very simply, if you’re doing a grand opening, give them a reason to be there at a specific time. Your excitement will help sell it.

(Side note: I’m booked as a magician for weddings many times a year. I specifically tell clients not to advertise me because that day is about the bride and not the magician.)

3. You think strolling magic is a lot cheaper:

If you think this, don’t book a magician. I promise, you have a very high chance of being disappointed. I have new clients every year that think strolling magic is a fraction of the cost of a formal show.

The worst I ever heard was someone that recommended me to a committee for a fundraiser, because of how much money they saw me raise for another nonprofit. They wanted to book me for a stage show and, after weeks of deliberating, they came back and said they had booked an open bar instead. They now wanted me to do strolling magic…for the entire event…for about 30% of my fee because, in their own words, “It shouldn’t be more than that.” I declined and they booked a low budget magician.

FYI, from a mutual friend that was closely connected with that committee, and had also recommended me, “They lost more money than the event cost.”

If you’re going low budget, buy a nice set of cornhole boards and have an indoor tournament. Don’t book entertainment that will embarrass you beyond recovery.

Thoughts on multiple magicians…

If you’re having a very large event and have the idea of wanting multiple magicians, speak to a professional magician first! I cannot stress this enough. I have talked nearly every client out of having multiple magicians, if that was what they approached me with. The reason is…they didn’t need it.

Unless the entire event is specifically about magic, I believe the best case scenario for having multiple magicians is when the event is so big, it’s unlikely that attendees will even notice there’s more than one.

Off the top of my head, I’ve done five events where there were multiple magicians. That’s over more than 20 years. Out of those, I would only say that one of them definitely benefited from more than one magician. It was two magicians total…and 2,000 people.

If you’re planning on booking multiple magicians, speak to a professional magician about it first. They may give you strong recommendations on whether or not you should. Also, if they agree that more than one magician is a good thing, they will likely give you a recommendation on who else to book. It’s always good for the magicians to be a good contrast, in the event that guests see more than one.

What a professional magician might do…

It’s always possible that if you end up with much fewer people than expected, a pro magician might have a suitable backup plan.

I did a magic show in Raleigh, NC for a speakeasy type setting. Because of a travel issue, more than half of their people couldn’t make it. This information was given to me shortly after I arrived at the venue. I immediately worked with the speakeasy employees to quickly rearrange chairs and get people seated. I did a 45 minute close-up show to rave reviews. The client was over the moon because it fit so much better with that size group. Keep in mind, not being a Raleigh magician (at least not based there), I had never seen this venue. This came many experiences in very similar venues over an already semi-long career.

If you’re booking a pro, lean on their experience always!

Overall

I’ll say it again, I believe a good strolling magician is the single greatest form of live entertainment that you can have at an event. Just don’t book one for the wrong event and forever think that a strolling magician isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.