The magical blog of Steven Gabriel Warburton

 ...has been a good one, magically speaking. January is usually the toughest month of the year for magicians. The Christmas rush is over, no one is booking corporate shows, and most people don't want to go out in the cold to watch magic shows anyway. Of course there are exceptions. I am a January baby and I always like to celebrate my birthday by doing a charity magic show. This year, we chose a local autism charity (my son is on the spectrum) and I am so happy that so many people in the small town where I live braved the frosty temperatures to come out and see some illusions. And how happy I was that the Fraternité donated the money I paid to rent their hall right back to the charity.  About the only bad thing that happened that night was that I severely over-estimated how much birthday cake I would need to feed the masses. I ordered a FULL SLAB from the grocery store when a quarter slab would have absolutely been big enough. No matter. The family and my workmates got to feas...

  I just wrapped up yet another weekend in Calgary. It ended with my sister, brother and me attending a Weird Al Yankovic concert at the Jack Singer Hall on the evening of July 6. It was the third time seeing Weird Al in concert and this show was markedly different than the other two times I saw him - Calgary in 1996 and Ottawa in August of 2007. Those shows featured plenty of theatrics, clips from his movie UHF and televised faux interviews with other famous musicians, and a cornucopia of costume changes. At one point in the Calgary show, Al cavorted around the stage with one ankle behind his neck. But this most recent show was a more stripped down affair. It was just Al and his band onstage, sitting down for the entire performance. No parodies either. Not an Eat it or a Fat or an Amish Paradise to be heard. This show focused on his original material, songs that were style pastiches rather than direct parodies. There was lots of material from in 1984 offering, In 3D,...

This past Saturday afternoon, I was relaxing at a local playground/splash pad with my son when I received a somewhat panicked text message from a fellow magician friend in Ottawa. He had a strolling magic gig that night that he couldn't attend and was desperate to find a replacement. I volunteered happily. Now this created a mild panic for me because I knew that, in about four hours time, I was expected to be dressed to the nines and doing card tricks in an Italian restaurant 150 km away. Quite frankly, I looked like a slob that afternoon in the playground. I hadn't shaved in a week, my hair was a nightmare, and my sinuses' ongoing love affair with hay fever season was threatening to derail the whole thing. But hey, I'm an optimist. I brought my son home, had a quick shower and shave, and then came to a frightening realization – I hadn't done a strolling magic show in three years.  Ever since COVID started, all my shows have been stage shows. There was, for the most...

For the past 10 years or so, I have been doing campground magic shows on a fairly regular level. I was inspired to do so after reading an e-book by my fellow magician, Devin Knight (link here: https://www.lybrary.com/campground-conjuring-for-cash-p-603982.html .) It's a great book but I found that the technique described my Mr. Knight doesn't work for Canadian campgrounds, though I have no doubt it works with American ones.* I tend to dedicate the Victoria Day weekend to a campground tour; this year, I was blessed to have six shows - three on Saturday and three on Sunday. While I was setting up for my second Saturday show, the entire eastern part of the province was struck by a torrential rainstorm. It knocked down trees, felled power lines, and plunged a big old portion of the population into a blackout. The lights went out at the campground and some of the campers opined that I wouldn't be doing a show that day. But then, miracle of miracles, the power came back on and so...

 It's been a long time since I have written on this blog. I bet everyone can figure out why. Yep, COVID-19. It totally wiped out all of my magic shows. Last year, I was set to do a number of county fairs, school shows, and campgrounds. I had to cancel everything. I lost a lot of money but I won't feel too sorry for myself. Other people got bitten by this a lot worse. Two days ago, I received my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. There were no side effects. In a little under two weeks, I am told I'll be mostly protected but to watch out for the Delta variant. I'll watch out for it. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to performing again.

Last weekend, I was super pleased that I finally got the opportunity to perform at the Bonsoo, one of the greatest winter carnivals in Ontario. The Bonsoo is in Sault Ste. Marie, which is the hometown of Ron Francis, one of my favourite NHL players of all time. The Sault Ste. Marie is also home of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds hockey team, where Wayne Gretzky played before he joined the NHL. But enough about hockey. The Bonsoo organizers invited me to perform three shows at the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre. It is one of the most amazing venues ever. As I stood onstage, I was surrounded by old vintage airplanes, many of which you could actually enter and see how pilots flew their planes more than a hundred years ago. In fact, a couple kids even confessed to sitting in one of those planes so they could watch my entire show from behind. "We wanted to see if we could figure out how you did your tricks," one of them confessed. "Did you?" I asked. "...

Hi there. My name is Steven Gabriel (that is a stage name) and I am a professional magician from East Ontario, Canada. I specialize in corporate events and festivals, though I've also been known to dabble in school shows. This blog is going to be a little different than other showbiz blogs in that I don't intend to spend a whole lot of time talking about how great I am and how many standing ovations I received last night. Instead, I want to focus on the people I meet and the things I learn while performing on the road. It's much better to be interested than interesting . The former is a two-way street; the latter is a shortcut to narcissism. Okay. So here goes. I had the glorious fortune to perform in one of the hospitality suites at the Electrical Safety, Technical, Maintenance, and Projects conference in Calgary this month. Eaton, the international power management company, brought me in to entertain their employees, clients and - yes - even competitors. Most of the...