Calista Sinclair: You Married A Witch!

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https://melbournemagicfestival.com/you-married-a-witch/

Date Reviewed: 01/07/2026

You Married A Witch – The Melbourne Magic Festival

Did you know only 2% of professional magicians worldwide are women? After two decades in the business, Australian magician, performer and storyteller Calista Sinclair makes sure that you will never forget that statistic again.

Sinclair is a FISM World Champion Award winner, and You Married A Witch! is her brand new 45-minute full stage show, premiering for the very first time at this year's festival. Structured across four acts, it's a deeply personal reckoning being part memoir, part magic, part quiet interrogation of an industry that has rarely made space for women.

Sinclair embodies the role of the magician's assistant, named Lindsay, and her crowd work is smooth. Does a magician's assistant bleed when cut? This is the opening question of the night and we are taken for a ride.

We witness a recount of her losing herself, soul searching, metaphorically and physically sawn in two and painstakingly piecing it all back together again. The illusions of cards, mentalism, sleight of hand and the classic act of being cut in half become vessels for something far more raw than spectacle. History's long, uneasy relationship between women and magic runs beneath every trick and by the end you're left turning over a genuinely uncomfortable question: who does the hard work in this business? Is it the assistant or the magician who takes the bow?

Compressing a life's journey into 45 minutes might be the most impressive illusion Sinclair performs all evening. The intentional, clever script and storytelling leave children delighting in the stunts and thrills, while adults, equally amazed, find themselves somewhere else entirely. Her deeply personal autobiographical monologue delivered virtually trapped in a box that won't unlock leaves us wondering how many of our own lives have also been locked away, restrained by the norms around us, broken and unfulfilled. 

The show closes on a note that lingers: her hope that young girls watching might see magic as a genuine job they too pursue one day. So does a magician's assistant bleed when cut? You'll have to see for yourself and book a night in with the magician's assistant who shines centre stage. You Married A Witch! is well-orchestrated, tightly performed and unexpectedly moving autobiography told through magic and theatre.