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How Do I Decide Which Magician to Hire?
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 How do I Decide Which Magician to Hire?
There are several important criteria you should consider when you decide to hire a magician (or, indeed, any entertainer) for your event. Chief amongst these are: 1. Availability, 2. Reliability, 3. Skill, 4. Personality, 5. Appearance, and 6. Price.
Availability
It is obvious that any performer you hire must be available at the time of your event. However, sometimes the situation (either the performer's or yours) is more complicated than that. Does the performer have any other commitments that day? If he should be doing another show before yours and it runs late, will that affect his arrival for your event? If he has another show after yours, and your event runs late, will that mean that he has to shorten his performance for you to meet his other obligation? Can you--and are you willing to--change the schedule of your event to accomodate the performer's schedule?
Bill has encountered all of these situations in his own work. One Christmas season he had two parties scheduled the same evening, with just enough time in between to allow for his travel. He made each client aware of the other's party and the resulting time constraint. As it happened, the caterers at the first party were running late, and Bill was the after-dinner entertainment. He had to shorten his show to be able to make it to the other event, but his clients knew this ahead of time and, while disappointed, were understanding. He recently had both a wedding reception and a charity fund-raiser the same Saturday evening. The reception was running about 30 minutes late, but the schedule on the fund-raising event was flexible enough that he was able to do the full show at the reception. In March, 2001, he did a Christmas show for a family in Rolling Hills Estates--they were so eager to have Bill perform that they scheduled the show around his availability! (Actually, that's a bit of an exaggeration: At Christmas, the uncle promised all the children that he would hire a magician to do a show. But he did wait about one month to accomodate Bill's schedule, and Bill did a show with a Christmas theme.)
Reliability
You may be surprised to find that many times an entertainer will be booked for a performance and simply fail to show up for the event! Unfortunately, this sort of behavior happens all too often. When you hire someone to entertain your guests you want to make sure that he always honors his commitments so that neither you nor your guests are disappointed.
In all the years Bill has been performing he has only once missed a show for which he was booked, and that was an extremely unusual situation. One Tuesday evening he received a phone call asking him to perform out-of-town that Friday evening. The client made the airline reservations and on Friday afternoon Bill arrived at the airport and boarded the airplane. For the next 90 minutes he sat on the runway until the pilot announced that a mechanical problem was preventing them from taking off. Unfortunately, the next available flight was already filled, and would have arrived too late for the party. Bill immediately phoned his client who was quite understanding, but Bill couldn't help feeling that he had let them down.
Apart from such unusual circumstances, the entertainer you hire should have a reputation for reliability.
Skill
You always want to hire the most skillful performer you can, but skill is an elusive quality which takes on many forms. For a magician, one aspect of skill is his technical ability, his mastery of sleight-of-hand or illusion or misdirection / psychology. But there is also the skill at being able to handle an audience, and being good at handling one type of audience--adults in a cocktail lounge, for example--may not imply skill at handling another type of audience--say, children at a birthday party. Skill also encompasses the entertainer's ability to relate to his audience, to be comfortable in their presence and to make them comfortable in his.
Often prospective clients will judge a magician's skill based upon awards he has earned, or contests he has won. While these are certainly good indications of a performer's technical ability, they may say nothing about how he will perform in a real-life setting entertaining paying customers. Additionally, you should be aware that the type of performance which wins competitions can be extremely different from the type of performance which will entertain your guests; the former may be extremely frenetic--"jam as many items as you can into a ten-minute act"--whereas the latter may be much more relaxed, engaging, and interactive. To best judge the skill of an entertainer you are considering, you should try to see him in a performance--preferably live but possibly on tape--which is similar to the one you need.
Bill began performing in 1992 as the direct result of attending a performance by an unskilled magician. The occasion was a pair of magic shows at his children's elementary school one Friday evening. Everyone--Bill included--was looking forward to a great show. While the performer was technically competent, and his choice of material was appropriate for the audience, the unmistakable feeling which came across was that this magician would rather have been anywhere else but on that stage performing for those families. He was not having a good time, and it was painfully obvious. And that ruined the show. For everyone.
Personality
This goes hand-in-hand with some of the aspects of skill mentioned above. The performer you hire should have a personality which fits the type of performance you are expecting. For a child's birthday party, for example, you probably wouldn't hire a magician who specializes in macabre or dark magic. Alternatively, for a seance or Halloween performance you may want to steer clear of a magician who performs in clown make-up. Less obvious would be to make certain that the magician you hire to perform strolling magic for a group of accountants would be able to engage your guests in small talk on matters of money--a subject which they will enjoy discussing. This is another area where you are much better off if you can see an actual performance so that you can gauge for yourself whether this is the entertainer you want to hire.
Bill has included a video tape on this web site to make it as easy as possible for you to see how he interacts with an audience. Furthermore, his extremely diverse background makes it much easier for him to fit comfortably into any social setting. But he still encourages all of his clients to meet him beforehand so that they know what he is like in person. Often he will meet them for an evening at The Magic Castle, which not only provides for a thoroughly enjoyable evening for everyone, but it gives his clients a chance to evaluate his skill, his personality, and his appearance firsthand.
Appearance
It is unfortunate that so many people are judged immediately by their appearance, and equally unfortunate that there are so many performers who fail to realize this. The performer you hire will be judged by your guests, and that judgment--good or bad--will reflect on you. To say that the person you hire should be neat, clean, well-dressed, and well-groomed seems clear, but many entertainers will not meet these simple standards. Note, too, that appearance goes beyond mere neatness and cleanliness. The magician hired to perform at a wedding reception should not be dressed in jeans, nor should the entertainer at an outdoor company picnic be wearing a tuxedo.
It should be clear from the photos and video on his web site that Bill is quite concsientious about his appearance. He is always neat, clean, and well-groomed. As for his choice of attire, he follows a simple rule: to dress slightly better than the guests he will be entertaining. He has heard it put this way: always dress as if, when you leave this party, you will be going to a nicer party.
Price
It seems that price is often the primary criterion used to decide on which of several performers to hire. There are two primary views on this subject. Some people, whether constrained by budget or not, believe that they should get the lowest price possible, and that all other considerations are secondary. Others believe that "you get what you pay for" and will hire an expensive act over a less-costly one because it "must be better." In truth, neither of these approaches will ensure that you get the best entertainment for your money. There are many excellent magicians who are relatively inexpensive, and there are many high-priced magicians who are not worth their asking price. And there is an entire spectrum in between. As an indicator of the quality of the entertainment you will be getting, price is probably the poorest yardstick you can choose.
Bill has experienced this problem from both sides. He has had prospective clients decide to hire another performer simply because Bill "did not charge enough" and they believed, therefore, that he couldn't be that good. (This was before the web site and the video.) On the other hand, he recently lost a booking to another performer because the company committee which decided on the entertainment based its decision solely on the price of the proposals they received. Bill did get some comfort, however, when he got a phone call after the event from the woman who had contacted him, to tell him that they would NEVER again hire the magician they had booked, and that she was now quite sorry that the decision had been based only on the price.
Summary
This represents one view on the important criteria you should consider when hiring a magician or other entertainer for your event. The paragraphs above are obviously intended to highlight Bill's qualifications and to steer you to the decision to hire him rather than another performer. Because this is his web site you should expect nothing less. But the important information you should carry away from this article is that you should know what you want in a performer, and make sure that whoever you hire meets your needs--all of your needs. Bill hopes that you will decide to hire him. But, if you decide to hire someone else, at least you will know some good questions to ask. |
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