Is it very difficult to get a contract there?

Yes

But what do you need for a contract? What is the most important thing for them?

A good show.

Hehehehe. I love it. But, so true

Robert Haas

Just one show? Please be more specific.

Santiago,
Here's the situation you face: there are a lot of performers who WANT to work on cruise ships and a limited number of openings. Plus many performers who currently work on ships want to continue working on ships leaving less room for new performers to break into the market.

Your job isn't just to be good, it's to stand out. What do I mean? I'm not sure, because I don't know how to read the minds of entertainment directors. Most of the time they don't really know what they are looking for other then something that catches their eye and stands out from the crowd.

My suggestion about cruise ships (along with other highly desirable venues) is to spend your time working OTHER venues where you can improve your act and be seen. One thing I can tell you is cruise companies love to work with entertainers who are 'in demand' not ones who are sitting at home.

Also look for opportunities to videotape your show under the best conditions. These days your video needs to answer all the questions someone should have about your act. And be willing to edit it down to 6 minutes. After that they will probably stop watching anyway.

Best of Luck

Peter

Thanks a lot.

"And be willing to edit it down to 6 minutes. After that they will probably stop watching anyway."

Not true. In my experience bookers like to see at least 45 minutes unedited.

Santiago,

I've found Fred Becker's material to be very informative.

http://www.fredbecker.com/store.htm

He goes into a lot of detail about what to expect and what will be expected from you.

Also, the key word in keithmagic's comment was GOOD. I've spoken with a lot of cruise directors and cruise entertainers about working the venue and quality is king so to speak. Not only will you be seen by the passengers, but you will be seen in context of at least a week's other entertainment - some of which is highly and expensively produced by the cruise lines themselves.

I've wanted to work on cruise ships for the last few years (a lot of the pros here can attest to the fact that I've bugged them with pretty naive questions. They've always patiently answered - so thanks guys ) I've been working as hard as I can in small venues, but I still don't feel ready to approach the cruise lines yet. My magic is technically good and the routines are playing well, but the production quality is still nowhere near where it should be. Sometimes it feels like I'm walking from Seattle to New York and watching the guys who know what they're doing fly overhead, but I'm hoping to eventually get there strong and ready to perform at a world-class level.

Good luck to you,
Richard

Thanks a lot. At this moment I don't have the money to buy the guide but I'll save.

When you perform on cruise ships you have your own room, just like a passenger or like a member of tripulation?

It really depends on the contract. All of the performers I have talked with on ships, except one, had passenger status onboard.

Thanks,
Richard

Do they book you for one week or for a season of 6 months?

Most likely would be between 2 - 6 months and at the end of that if they want you to keep performing you'll have to sign another contract. They would have you go throughout the summer and other warm seasons.

Zach

Santiago,
I agree with Tom on the unedited video. I have spoken to a couple of the major cruise line entertainment directors. I called and asked for information on what they are looking for in the way of an act. One that I spoke with gave me 30 minutes of his time and answered many questions. He stressed that an unedited audition tape was imperative. He likes to see how a performer handles audience members on and off the stage and also how one handles problems in a show. He also strongly suggested taking a cruise to see what type of talent is already booked. Be honest with your intent and give them a call. the ones that I've spoken with were very nice. Also be prepared to have a little bit of adult humor in your show...for the late evening crowd. People like Micheal Finney are the types that would do well in this late night slot. I was told that the early show is clean but the later show can be a little blue. Not raunchy, but more innuendos than in the early show. Hope this helps.
Lou

I don't mean to say this in a bad way, but to be able to perform on cruise ships you will need to invest a lot of time, energy and money. I don't know what the current show you are performing is like, but the entertainment management of the majority of cruise lines will require that a performer has a show with very good and very nice props and excellent costumes. All these cost a lot of money.

If you don't have $50 (if memory serves me well, that was the price of Fred Becker's book) for this book which really contains tons of valuable advice, how would you manage to put a good act together. Please, don't misunderstand me, I have seen acts performed with minimum props and which were relatively inexpensive, but the performers with such minimum shows were pure geniuses and in many cases such shows were equally entertaining as some big illusion shows.

I don't mean to disappoint you, nor do I mean to tell you that the clue is in the money invested in the show - it's not - the money invested in the show is just a tiny little component of a good show while the larger portion of the essence of having a good show is hard work, experience and charisma. But the truth is that the magic shows in majority of cruise lines nowadays are big shows with large visual props (illusions) and that you will need a lot of money to have such a show.

Nowadays the ships are getting bigger and bigger, and so are the show lounges and theaters on board. Also, the expectations of entertainment management in the majority of the cruise lines are getting more and more extravagant, which in many cases means bigger and bigger shows (not necessarily so, but it's often the case).

I perform on cruise ships and I can tell you that a lot of time, energy and money is invested into my show. It took me some 13-14 years of performing in land based venues to get enough experience and put together a show that is suitable for a cruise ship. Some of the other performers that I have met on board the ships I have performed at have such big shows that the value of the equipment and the props is more than $ 100 000!!!

Now, this whole post is not meant to disappoint you nor to make you give up on trying to get some work on a cruise ship, but rather to move in that direction if that is something that you really want. So think about it, decide if that is what you really want, and head into the adventure of gaining experience and putting together a show that will have a chance to sail on board some ship.

A stage show is basically a direction you should be moving towards. A magician on a cruise ship will mostly perform either in a theatre on larger ships or in a smaller cabaret lounge on smaller ships (or both). The magic should be visual and most importantly - entertaining. There should be a lot of interaction with the audience and comedy.

This issue has been discussed a lot in this section of the forum, so explore this forum, even on a couple of recent pages you will find lots of topics and lots of advice regarding what a cruise show should be like. You will need to have enough material for 2 entirely different 45 minute shows and more. Basically if you put all performing material of a typical cruise line magician together, you will mostly get something between 2-3 hours of the highly polished audience tested material.

The shows should have a strong impact leaving structure (you want the people to talk about your show for days) and it is a complete "science" of its own how to put a show in such way. There is a lot of literature written on this topic, but I would say that a lot of stage experience is the key here.

As for the promotional video (nowadays mostly in a DVD format), it is true that they would probably want to see your whole show in like 45 minutes of unedited video, but not at the very beginning. You initially need to send them a DVD with one or more short professionally edited trailers which should be the blends of excerpts of your show(s) from various venues in professional stage setting with lights, etc. Basically when you send them such a video this is as if you are saying to them: "Hello, this is me". So, make sure that you put some of your best moments near the very beginning. They get hundreds of promo materials every week and they get bored easily so if the begining of the video is not good at the very beginning, your DVD goes to the garbage after less than a minute.

Magicians used to send the footage of the full length of the show before, but nowadays in the era of communication, the entertainment management would not have time to watch it. Actually, they would watch the very begining and see you opener and maybe the first trick, and they'll stop watching due to the lack of time. So believe me, you should send them a short edited trailer of 5-6 minutes. Only once they get interested in your show they will contact you and they will want to know what you will do exactly this is the time when your unedited 45 (or whatever length of footage is required from you) minute show comes into play. That's when you will need to send it and that's when they will watch it. In my short cruise career (5 years now that I've been doing cruises) in lots of situations they didn't even require the unedited 45 min footage, but instead they sked me to send them the detailed script of the show with detailed descriptions of routines or simply they would ask me to send them descriptions of everything that I would perform and they chose from it whatever they want.

Anyway, if you are asked to send the 45 min. footage, make sure that you have exactly the same routines like the ones you will be performing onboard, that it is not a studio footage but a footage in front of a live audience in a venue and a setting that is similar to the ones onboard. You don't want to send them a footage of you performing on a kids' birthday party nor a footage of you producing a CEO on some corporate show, nor you as a star of your local TV station's David-Blaine-like TV show. You will in most cases need to send them the footage of family oriented show performed in front of a family audience and shot in a theatre, variety theatre or so.

If you plan to perform on a cruise, make sure that your show is family oriented and that you have a very clean performance material (that your routines or jokes would not harass anyone). It has to be a stage show, not a close up show. Also make sure that the genre of the typical cruise show would mostly fall in betweens the general stage magic, comedy magic and illusions. For a number of reasons, most of the cruise lines don't book mentalists nor hypnotists. It is because some cruise lines had issues with lawsuits - some passengers believed that what some mentalists or hypnotists that performed onboard was real and they raised lawsuits against cruise lines... This had cost cruise lines a lot of money (and of course - none of the accusations could be proven in court), plus the Cruise Lines don't want their passengers to feel uncomfortable so mentalist shows and hypnotists will mostly not be the desired kind of performers.

Please read the previous posts on this topic and you'll get more of an idea what is required from a cruise entertainer...

I had been working on cruise ships really a lot before. Sometimes even 200 days in one year.
You need to take care of cabins. Many times they want put you in the worst cabin in the boat if you don’t take care of it. You need to know cabins are not very big and you need to live in there with all your things.
In some boats you must stay only in crew places when you have free time. Sometimes its winding and you need to make your show even if you feel sick. Sometimes there is accidents and sometimes boats are listing.

I have been out now almost ten years and I can say only that I don’t miss it very much.

Thanks Diamond...Great Post!

I don't know which cruise lines you have worked with Marcomagia, but the things are quite different in majority of the cruise lines...

I think it's more a question of a status you are given onboard. Good cruise lines always give performers a passenger status which means passengers' cabins, all sorts of privileges, unrestricted access to all public areas onboard, no drills, except for one passenger drill once you embark the ship, basically anything the passengers can do and even more!

In majority of the cruise lines, especially in big ones, the performers get passenger status which means - you get a passenger cabin with a full cabin service (cabins are cleaned daily by the housekeeping staff, you can use the room service, etc.), you dine in fine restaurants and buffets onboard, you are allowed to be in all passenger areas including bars, lounges, discos, swimming pool, gym, spa, etc. The cruise line will even give you all sorts of treats like fresh fruits brought to your cabin daily by your cabin steward, and we even had bottles of chilling champagne awaiting in the cabin after every show as a complimentary treat from the company. With one of the companies I have worked for, it was the case that they have a policy of always giving the best cabins onboard to the featured guest entertainers or headliners. With this company we always got the best balcony cabins and this company even gave us 2 separate big cabins, as my assistant and I are not a married couple.

Once you have managed to work out your way to getting a job onboard a vessel of some company, and once you have finished all your preparations for the journey and rehearsals to make sure that you give your best at the show, you can almost completely relax. Good cruise lines are aware that there is a lot of hard work behind every show, they want to see a sincere smile of joy on the face of every performer. If you live badly onboard and if you are disrespected and mistreated onboard, it would reflect in your show and good companies with a good reputation know that and they don't want a show that wouldn't be absolutely appreciated by the audience.

I always keep telling my friends: "My workplace - a ship and a contract on it almost comes to me as a vacation, my real work is something that almost no one sees - time spent in sweat and tears in my rehearsal studio and that is work that I'm not even being paid for, but that's the "real work". Contracted and paid work on a ship brings me the joy of performing, the joy of exploring new parts of the world, the joy of enjoying all the luxuries possible, long periods of time without stress (I always catch myself walking around the ship with a smile on my face) and good money.

I know that there are cruise lines that do not respect the performing artists onboard so much, so they pay performers much less money, the performers get crew status, they live in small crew cabins, they have to share cabins with other performers, in many cases they even get side duties which are normally done by cruise staff in big companies, their access to public areas is restricted, etc. It seems that you have worked for one of these companies... I was once offered a contract from one Italian cruise line, and one Spanish cruise line that were like that, but I turned those offers down because of the living conditions onboard and low fees they were offering. I have also heard that the majority of Greek cruise lines (they mostly do the Mediterranean cruises, Greek island cruises, etc.) are like that and that horrible things happen to performers there, but if you happen to get an offer from any renowned and world famous cruise lines, you can really say that the life has smiled upon you!!!


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On 2008-01-09 08:01, suspectacts wrote:
Thanks Diamond...Great Post!


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Thank you for your nice and friendly comment Peter!!! I'm always trying to help fellow performers who have an ambition to perform on cruise ships. I remember that it took me a couple of years to find the right way to do it when I was starting in this area many years ago (maybe my posts with all sorts of inquiries on this issue and on how to make a decent promotional video still exist somewhere on this forum). At that time there was a lot of silence from many people closely guarding the secrets on getting booked to perform on cruise ships. But there were also good and helpful members who have sent me tons of precious advice which has really helped me a lot. Nowadays when I perform on ships, I'm trying to render my own experience and help aspiring cruise performers as much as I can.

My biggest reward would be meeting some of the guys (the ones that are just starting and making inquiries on this issue now as well as some experienced participants of this forum) in some port of call, having a cup of coffee in some Café in the port and talking about magic.

By the way, I will be cruising "Italian style" onboard Costa Concordia and Costa Marina a lot starting from March to October. I will first be doing Mediterranean (Eastern Mediterranean as well as Western Mediterranean) then in summer I will be doing the Baltic and Norwegian fjords and then back to Mediterranean at the end of summer all the way to October. If you or any other cruise performers are sailing that way, send me a PM and I will be glad to meet you if it happens that on some day we are in the same port of call!!!!

Of course there are different boats. It is very good and not so good but in every boat an accident can happen. I think it doesn’t make any different for your payment if you are crew or not. In Finland it comes from law that you must be crew if you work in boat just after the Estonia sinking. It means if something bad happened you are last one with other crew in boat! I have seen the best cabins and I’m sure that they don’t give those for artist or then they put your salary smaller. I had always cabined alone and that didn’t mean there wasn’t other beds. That boat takes 200-3500 passengers and even boat of 200 passengers can be luxury. Fruits you can find free from mess too.

http://www.tallinksilja.com/fi/tab2/ships/serenade/