Meet Chris Fisher, the Illusions Designer with Three Shows on Broadway

He’s the magic link between Paranormal Activity, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Stranger Things: The First Shadow

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When Chris Fisher was about four years old, he broke his leg and was hospitalized for weeks. Bored and stuck in a bed, he needed some distractions.

“My parents would bring in things to entertain me, and one was a magic set,” Fisher recalls. “I fell in love with it. Every school holiday I would buy more sets and then do shows for friends and family. In my teens, I was a magician doing gigs.”

Decades later, that lifelong passion has brought him to Broadway, where Fisher’s jaw-dropping work can currently be seen in three crowd-pleasers: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Lyric Theatre, Stranger Things: The First Shadow at the Marquis Theatre and Paranormal Activity at the August Wilson Theatre. While illusions are not required for most shows, Fisher has found that his skills are increasingly in demand. Over the past eight years, he’s worked on half a dozen Broadway productions and more in his native UK. While his job is to conjure spectacle, he always keeps one important rule in mind: “It’s got to serve the story,” he says.

Magicians are also storytellers, so it makes sense that Fisher ended up in theatre. “I worked in technical management and stage management for 20 years while doing magic on the side,” he says. (“On the side” is an understatement considering Fisher is a longtime member of The Magic Circle, an elite British organization for world-class practitioners.) While working as a company manager for Wicked, Fisher met Jamie Harrison, who created illusions for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the West End. 

“He contacted me and said, ‘I’ve been called to do Harry Potter. Will you do it with me?” Fisher recalls. “Within a year, Harry Potter was on Broadway, and I took the plunge around 2017 to be a full-time illusions designer.”

That plunge has paid off, as did Fisher’s years working in many facets of theatre. “I have an understanding of how I can use other departments to make the illusions happen,” he explains. “Illusions have to take into account every technical department: lighting, costumes, wigs, everything is in that moment, so my career in technical theatre really served me.”

Last year, Fisher won a Special Tony Award for his contributions to Stranger Things: The First Shadow (which he shared with Harrison and other collaborators). He has also worked with visionary director Marianne Elliott on her revivals of Angels in America and Company, and though these shows had fewer special effects, they still benefited from his gifts.

For Angels in America, “you never saw the spirits walk on or off from the wings; they’d come through the bed,” he notes. And he enhanced two musical sequences in Company. In “Getting Married Today,” a priest popped out of a fridge followed by the ensemble emerging from unexpected areas of the kitchen. His work in “Tick Tock” involved body doubling, with Bobbie’s lover magically appearing in many places seemingly at once.

“People are starting to understand what illusions can bring, how they can be used to facilitate certain effects and uplift shows,” Fisher says. “It’s not just for a magic trick. You can even use these techniques to create horror.”

That’s Fisher’s role with the recently opened Paranormal Activity, a theatrical expansion of the horror film franchise. “What’s really exciting with Paranormal Activity is creating live scares onstage,” he says. “We’re so used to seeing this genre on-screen, with those gimmicks happening via CGI or camera angles. On stage, we can’t cut from camera to camera, so we guide you to look at the right places. You’re jumping with over 1,000 people next to you. You come out of this show with a newfound understanding of what theatre can do.”

Paranormal Activity has jump scares, specters and multiple how-did-they-pull-that-off moments. As with all his work, Fisher notes that “once you know how something is done, you can’t unsee it,” so he hopes anyone who figures anything out will stay quiet. “Keep the secrets. It’s fun not to know.”

Fisher loves illusions design because of how deeply collaborative it is. A director will describe an effect they want and then Fisher, in tandem with other designers, will create the space for it to happen while working with actors to ensure their movement tricks the eye to allow for the magic to be seen.

What looks seamless, however, can be difficult to pull off. Stranger Things, in particular, “was really hard: it’s a massive show with the high pressures of Netflix and Broadway,” Fisher notes, adding that when the play transferred from the West End, he and his team amped up some of the effects for Broadway. “Magic and horror are all about the timing,” Fisher says, so the scare hits when you least expect it. 

Fisher says his work also benefits from “the Jaws effect: seeing the fin coming through the water with the music is scarier than seeing the mechanical shark. What’s in your head is always scarier than what you actually see.”

That’s especially true for Paranormal Activity, which debuted in the UK two years ago, so Fisher has had ample time to fine-tune. “We would listen to audiences every night,” Fisher recalls, recalibrating beats based on theatregoers’ reactions. He admits that there’s nothing like hearing an audience jump as one when a trick goes off at just the right moment. Only then, he says, “can I breathe a sigh of relief.”

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TDF MEMBERS: At press time, discount tickets were available for Stranger Things: The First Shadow. Log in to buy tickets and browse all our offers.

Paranormal Activity, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Stranger Things: The First Shadow are all frequently available at our TKTS Discount Booths.