Romhany's Multiplying Bottle Routine

Julian

I wanted to perform a multiplying wine bottle routine for my daughter’s wedding. I had never attempted to do this effect before so I was hunting around for information on routines and equipment. I did find some helpful advice on sets of bottles and decided to invest in the Tora Luxury Multiplying Bottles. However, these were not available at the time but the Tora Bottles from Paper Bag was available. By purchasing three sets of those I ended up with all the bottles I needed to do the Romhany Comedy Multiplying Bottle routine (for about the same cost or slightly less than an 8 bottle set.) What I lacked were the two tubes needed to perform the routine. I bought two plastic air vent extension tubes from a well known DIY store and these are exactlty the right dimensions for the Tora bottles. The tubes look OK white but I intend to cover them with some silver holographic PVC fabric I bought from China. I think they will then look like really classy stage props - better than the ones Tora supply with their multiplying bottle sets. The Romhany routine uses three stacks of three bottles so it would not have been possible to do Romhany’s routine exactly as he teaches it if I had bought the Tora Luxury Multiplying Wine Bottle set that has two stacks of four bottles each. (It would be possible to adapt Romhany’s routine if you only have 8 bottles rather than nine in total.) The Romhany routine is based on three stacks of three bottles - all s****s. The Tora bottles from paper bag set comes with an inner bottle that is not a s***l. It has a solid bottom and you can pour wine out of it. That is no use for the passe passe part of the Romhany routine (in which the bottle keeps changing places with the wine glass.) But it is useful to have as the third bottle in the third stack in Romhany’s routine. I struggled to find a full performance video of Romhany’s routine before buying the DVD so I hesitated on the basis that the DVD is not cheap and I didn’t know whether I would like the routine. I am very glad I bought it. The routine is excellent. In fact, I can’t think of a better way of doing the multiplying bottles (except the addition of pouring wine out of the last bottle.) The DVD does contain more than one, complete performance. Paul Romhany is an excellent teacher with a gentle Australian accent. The video material on the DVD is quite old but perfectly adequate. Romhany walks you through all the phases of the routine in detail and you get each step more than once from different camera angles. You also get a CD with the audio track you can use if you want to perform this the way Romhany does. You don’t have to use the audio track and, in some settings in which a PA system is not available, you could easily do the routine without it. You could follow all the moves Romhany teaches and perform this ‘straight’ without the comedy element if you wanted to. However, the humour in Romhany’s presentation is very appealing. It is based on the idea that the magician has purchased a new piece of magic from the Acme Magic Company but has not yet learned how to do the trick. The audio track purports to be an audio tutorial from Acme Magic. The magician acts as if he is following the instructions on the backing track but the trick appears to keep going slighgly wrong resulting in more and more bottles appearing. There is much more humour to the routine than I can reveal here, but this should give you the gist of it. You get two tracks, one with a male voice (Romhany himself) and an alternative track with a female voice (both with gentle but distinct Australian accents.) As Romhany says on the DVD, you could re-record the script with a different voice but unfortunately you don’t get a written script to help you with that. That would have been a helpful addition (or update to a rather dated production.) Following the audio track certainly helps you to remember some of the moves in the routine. However, this still requires considerable practice. As Romhany stresses, one of the keys to success is developing the acting skills to bring this off. Romhany gives you plenty of advice on that and is an excellent role model, though exactly how you perform this should reflect your own personality. Don’t be tempted to do a Paul Romhany impersonation. He’s a one off! However, with a little hard work you have a solid, four minute routine that could be a reputation maker. Having now seen a number of alternative routines on YouTube I can say that Romhany’s routine is by far the best I have seen - so much better than all those routines in which the magician ends up with a smug look on his face as if to say, “look how clever I am” (and the audinec thinks, “NOT!”) Romhany’s routine is high quality entertainment. Do not hesitate to buy this if you are thinking of parting with the large quantity of cash necessary to buy a high quality multiplying bottle set. (Romhany says that he collects sets of multplying bottles and, interestingly, the equipment he uses in the tutorial is rather basic and clunky. He even uses plastic, school dining room style cups with insulation tape round the top instead of wine glasses. He says he does that to prevent glass breakages, but in the video his plastic cups keeop falling over. I use real wine glasses - quite narrow ones and high quality and I’ve never had a breakage yet.) A useful tip is to put a nine inch red slik handkerchief in the two wine glasses you use. That makes the glasses more visible and you can take the silk out of the glass that remains at the end of the routine and replace it with the wine in the last bottle. Finally, I would advise you not to compromise on quality when buying a set of multiplying bottles. The Reg Donnelly set that was ideal for Romhany’s routine (because it has three stacks of three bottles) seems to have come down in price at Vanishing Inc. since I started looking for a set. However, I highly recommend the Tora Luxury set. The bottles are very high quality and will last a life time. They look like real wine bottles and represent excellent value for money. You can get a set of bottles for less than £100, but thet are usually not wine bottles but are short, dumpy, fake looking vermouth bottles of a dubious brand! The Tora bottles currently available are called Professional Multiplying Bottles and come in 11 different styles. All the bottles in a set appear to have identical labels (whereas the bottles I bought were all red wine bottles but had four different label styles.) At the time of writing this review, an eight bottle set with two tubes costs around £225. Only some styles are still available. In my experience, these are likley to run out quickly so snap a set up while they are available. You won’t regret it!