Quantum Magic at the World’s Largest Festival

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If you’ve never done the Fringe in Edinburgh before then you’re missing the most wonderful, crazy, busy, colourful month of arts, culture, comedy, theatre, dance, magic and much, much more all in about 1 square mile. My home town kinda doubles in size and becomes the centre for the arts in the World for a month. It’s simply amazing.IMG_8116

This year I was honoured to be invited premiere my brand new show – Quantum Magic at one of the most prestigious venues at the Fringe Festival – Gilded Balloon. The production was inspired by the amazing things that happen at the tiniest of levels known to man, known as Quantum Physics. At this level things appear/disappear, teleport, transform. It’s science that sounds just like magic. And it inspired me to create a fully examinable floating box of cards, to project the thoughts of my entire audience onto the lights around the room (with the help of special 3D glasses)

IMG_8107I’m delighted to say that over 2600 people came to see my show in the month, that’s almost a sell out every day! 2600 wonderful, wonderful people, with great taste in magic shows. That’s enough to just about fill Edinburgh’s biggest theatre – The Playhouse (another dream of mine!). Over the month I estimate that I performed to over 10,000 people at different variety nights, open spots and private events. Perhaps the largest number of people I have ever performed to in a month!

 

 

Highlights from the fringe

– Performing at one of the biggest, most prestige events on the fringe, The Big Comedy Gala
– Working on stage with Stephen K Amos, Ed Byrne and Tom Binns for the ‘Funny Turn’ charity event
– being on stage with the actual Dotaman! Who we invited to join us on stage for the last ever The Colour Ham Show. Dotaman is a BBC Alba TV presenter who has probably created more Gaelic TV than any other person.
– Opening the final The Colour Ham show with Gav and Col in the Debating Hall at Gilded Balloon.
– Watching Tom Binns, Piff the Magic Dragon and Colin Cloud‘s shows at the Fringe. Amazing acts.
– Putting a bottle through the chest of Ewan Cameron on STV‘s Fountainbridge show.
– Building a bespoke ‘Colour changing Flower Bed’ to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Gilded Balloon.

IMG_8185The big comedy gala is one of the biggest shows at the fringe. Up to 2000 gather to watch a selection of the best comedy talent on offer. So it was pretty special to be invited along to perform the last show ever with magic sketch group – The Colour Ham. An emotional last show for Col, Gav and I.

Just a week earlier, as I mentioned above we had all been on stage at gilded balloon for our swan song. 400 people – all absolutely avid colour ham fans – packed the room for one of the best colour ham shows of all time. We broke out a few sketches we hadn’t performed since 2012 and just packed in as much magical silliness as we could. The room went crazy when our Star guest, BBC children’s star Dotaman appeared on stage. If you’ve seen TCH before you’ll know we parody the DOTAMAN tv show. The only way we could think of to up it for our audience was to get the actual dotaman along. And Donny Dotaman absolutely stormed it. Guitar and all.

Such an intense and exhausting month, but I’ve came away full of energy and inspired.

The 2016 show is now in development and is going to absolutely rock. Watch. This. Space.