Hacker Cinema
The Magic Show
1983 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Norman Campbell
The Magic Show is a one-act musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Bob Randall. It starred magician Doug Henning. Produced by Edgar Lansbury, it opened on May 28, 1974 at the Cort Theatre in Manhattan, and ran for 1,920 performances, closing on December 31, 1978. Henning was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical and director Grover Dale was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical. In 2001, a filmed performance staged especially for the cameras in 1980, directed by Norman Campbell at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Toronto, was issued on DVD by Image Entertainment. This production, originally intended for cinema release, differed notably from the original Broadway production, with several of the most memorable songs, such as "West End Avenue" and "Solid Silver Platform Shoes", removed. Doug Henning reprised his original starring role, while Didi Conn co-starred as Cal.
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
2 comments on Hacker News
One of my favorite This American Life episodes where Penn and Teller talk about the genesis of this trick:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/619/the-magic-show
Explains the significance of Penn's ball kick at the end.
This is good advice, and it's helpful to have specific tools. There are definitely certain kinds of business ideas you can gauge the market using a facade MVP. If you're making a straightforward CRUD app on an standard stack, chances are high that you can prototype & test it without engineering.
I have a startup that made the mistake of building too much too early, but I don't think an MVP app would have helped me. The core idea of the app depends a lot on the experience and performance of the finished product, and customers have higher standards than we expected and they need integrations with lots of other services to know if it'll work for them.
I suspect there are lots of business ideas where you can't tell if it's going to work until the complete experience is in place. Uber, for example, since it was mentioned in the article. Certainly you can prototype the app to get a feel for the app, but that won't deliver the experience of the product at all, you won't know if you'd pay for it until you got a ride from a stranger in under two minutes.
This American Life recently had a podcast on magic, and interviewed Penn & Teller. Teller said something interesting along the lines of 'there are lots of things you can do halfway, but with magic you can't, with magic it either works or it's stupid.' (https://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/619/the-magic-show)
Aside from static MVP apps and surveys, what other ways are there to gauge the market for a new business idea?