Monday, November 05, 2018

ASTONIFY at The Secret Parlor Theatre Completed

I have finished my run of shows at The Secret Parlor Theatre in Chantilly. The Secret Parlor Theatre is now gone, vanished into the night. That was the plan all along. It was an experiment  and was not planned to run more than the month.  Will the SPT ever appear again? I'd say the chances are quite good, but in a different location(s).

My final performance at the theatre was great fun. I got to share more of the light seance routine, but as with other nights, I did not do the full seance. We had a small audience and I held some things back. Also, on this night, we had ZERO actual spirit interference. What does that mean? The building we were in is haunted. Every night we were there, something unusual would happen. People heard footsteps, people felt a presence, things would not work, it was crazy. But on the final night, not a peep out of our ghost. Now, that isn't to say there weren't manifestations during the seance, because there were. But as I mentioned in the show, this was an example of Spiritualism without the aid of Spirits! By the way, that line comes from a handbill belonging to Professor Harry Cooke, which I now have in my collection, and which is part of The Astonify Show. (see below the article)

The straight magic from the show included: Hofzinser's Everywhere & Nowhere, A Surprising Rope Mystery, and a Classic Ring in Nest of Boxes. There were other pieces, but those were the main ones. The seance part of my program begins with my Spirit Photo routine, which is so much fun to do. The Spirit Dial, which is shown at the top of the page is presented during the seance portion, and it concludes with the Spirit Horn. Missing from the seance was the new slate routine, and one other routine that I'm forgetting at the moment. Because this was the smaller seance, it does not include the Spirit Cabinet.

The Astonify Show is a work in progress. I wanted it to be a smaller venue show, but it seems that it will be growing in size very quickly. I plan to  add a couple true Victorian routines to the show, and then some adaptations of modern routines. Kind of like when I steampunked some props in my other show. I'll Victorianize props, lol. to make them work in this show.  Then of course, there is another option and that is recreating actual forgotten Victorian era magic. And I have two routines in mind, the bad part, no one knows how they're done today (thus the forgotten part). One routine, The Devils Cage, is a routine I've had my heart set on for a long time. I sense it's in my very near future.

I continue to write routines for the show, so expect amazing things to debut in next years version of the show!

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