The Most Dangerous Show I Ever Performed

The twenty pound steel cylinder exploded off its welded base, slammed into the ceiling of the gymnasium, and then fell into the crowd…

It was the best of times and the worst of times back in 1978.

I was on tour with my hypnosis show, and we’d made it bigger, louder, and far more elaborate than ever before. Originally, I performed out of nothing more than a briefcase. I’d begin with a few mentalism demonstrations to warm up the audience, then launch into the hypnosis with about thirty volunteers.

It was a wonderful way to perform because every show was different. I never quite knew who would come up onstage, or how they’d react to my suggestions. That unpredictability was part of the excitement. One fellow, convinced the Titanic was sinking beneath him, swam frantically across the stage to save himself. You couldn’t script moments like that, and I wouldn’t have wanted to.

Then everything changed when my manager had an idea on how to make the show better, and proceeded to arrange a brand-new stage show, in which hypnosis would be incidental, rather than the entire point.

With a set that resembled the bridge of a starship, complete with sixty-four square feet of fibre optics and enormous rear projection screens, we were about as cutting edge as a hypnosis show could be. Our crew spent three hours setting everything up before each performance and another ninety minutes tearing it all down afterwards. All of that effort was so my hypnotic subjects could experience a journey into outer space, complete with angry aliens, weightlessness, explosions overhead, and enough spectacle to make a science fiction movie proud.

Through the magic of theatrical effects, I didn’t even walk onto the stage. I materialized through a scrim curtain of hand-threaded LED lights as if I’d beamed aboard from another galaxy.

Then came the launch sequence.

The sound of enormous rocket engines shook the building, and you could actually feel the vibration in your chest. At exactly the right moment, eight foot flames erupted from both sides of the stage, fired from two heavy steel cylinders loaded with smokeless shotgun powder. The entire sequence was triggered by one of my crew from an offstage control panel, and every night it brought the house down.

At least, when everything worked properly.

The show had grown from ninety minutes to nearly two and a half hours. I was performing constantly, on the road continuously, and becoming completely exhausted. Agents and managers never seemed to understand that a stage performance actually requires energy. They happily accepted every booking that came along. 

Sometimes there wasn’t even time to eat before the show. I’d be performing, feeling like I was starving to death, while my crew enjoyed submarine sandwiches that had conveniently arrived after I’d already gone onstage.

I was physically worn out and chronically unhappy, although I didn’t fully admit it to myself. And I was on salary too, so I got paid the same, no matter how many shows I did. 

Then everything came to a head.

One night the heavy steel flame projector exploded off its mounting, shot into the gymnasium ceiling, and crashed back down into the audience. Miraculously, nobody was struck. Had it landed elsewhere, someone could easily have been killed.

The cause was simple. My manager had sent a young high school student helper to the hardware store for smokeless shotgun powder; the stuff the flame projectors were designed to use. Instead, he came back with black powder, which is vastly more explosive and completely unsuitable for what we were doing.

That wasn’t our only close call.

During a show in the southern United States, our indoor pyrotechnics refused to ignite properly because of the humidity. Rather than cancel the effect, my manager decided to improvise. Having run out of flash paper, he substituted ordinary paper napkins. Predictably, they caught fire and drifted down into the audience. One young woman ended up with ashes and debris in her eye.

By this point I’d gone from being a minimalist performer who amazed audiences with little more than skill, personality, and a briefcase, to becoming one small cog in an increasingly dangerous theatrical machine.

The final straw came in Ottawa.

Our pyrotechnic effects had been specially designed by Lunatech in Alabama, a company that also worked with major rock bands including RUSH and KISS. Some of the explosive charges were built directly into the stage and required both a key and a firing switch before they could be activated. It was an impressively engineered system.

Then one night, without warning, one of the charges detonated like a landmine about a foot away from where I was standing, hitting me with a blast of heat that nearly set my stage clothes on fire.

That was enough.

I walked away from the giant production, left the management company behind, and went back to my original idea. I became the man with a briefcase again instead of the captain of an expensive and increasingly dangerous starship.

Ironically, audiences enjoyed the simpler show just as much, and I enjoyed performing it far more. The hypnosis hadn’t changed at all. The elaborate set, the explosions, the giant screens, and all the theatrical excess had distracted from the real miracle happening onstage, which was the extraordinary capacity of the human mind to respond to suggestion.

It’s easy to think that bigger productions, louder music, and more spectacular effects somehow make hypnosis more impressive. In my experience, the opposite is often true. Hypnosis is already fascinating enough. It doesn’t need smoke, flames, or science fiction to make it remarkable. At its heart, hypnosis gives us one of the most elegant and effective ways ever discovered to communicate with the unconscious mind. 

With proper training in hypnosis, anyone can erase phobias, clear allergies, reduce or remove pain, and give people much better lives.

That’s more than enough magic for me.

- Mike Mandel