Doug Segal: I Can Make You a Mentalist @ Gilded Balloon Teviot

Through his past shows and television appearances, Doug Segal has proven his skills as a mind reader. This year, he wants to show you how to do it with a new hour of mind trickery relying heavily on crowd participation and mixing in visual elements, including short comic clips and explanatory graphs.

He filters the crowd through gender, age and a variety of other attributes (I sit down when he asks anyone who is a “bit of a dick” to do so) to find the perfect candidate, which, by chance, ends up being a lovely blonde named Katrina who is whisked on stage and strapped on to some kind of contraception called the 'Brain-matizer 3000' to perform a series of 'mentalist' challenges, such as telepathy and suggestion.

It’s a bit of silly, harmless fun with a video of Segal dressed as a woman, a storyline including his mentalist arch-nemesis and a bit which forces us to place tin foil on our heads. The crowd doesn’t seem too keen this evening and you can tell it’s affecting Segal’s performance. With a show revolving around audience involvement, you’d think the mentalist would be better prepared to deal with it.