Hypnotist Frank Santos Jr. returns to RWU

Sept. 8th, 2016

Natalie MacPhee

The RWU field house was filled with amusement and laughter on the night of Friday, Sept. 2 when hypnotist Frank Santos Jr. took the stage. Campus Entertainment Network successfully delivered a highly attended and attention grabbing event for the campus community to help kick off the new school year. The field house smelled of popcorn and corn dogs as guests took their seats with snacks and drinks to enjoy the humorous hypnotists show for the evening.

Frank Santos Jr. started the night by introducing himself and what the night had in store for the audience. He even stated the show would be “Rated R” at some points. The audience was quickly engaged and about forty students piled onto the stage when Frank asked for volunteers to possibly be hypnotized. He narrowed down approximately fifteen to twenty students who passed his hypnotic ability test, gauging how deep of a hypnotic mental state each student could achieve.

Once the students were hypnotized by listening to Frank’s calming voice and counting down from ten, the comedy show began. During the night the audience witnessed the hypnotized students ballet dance, lip sync, run around the field house, scream, and even remove toilet paper from the bathroom stalls and bring it back to the stage. Two girls preformed “Formation” by Beyoncé, while a few of the boys worked as a team to lip sync “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC, and one girl nailed a Meghan Trainor concert to the song “Me Too.” The girl who performed as Meghan Trainor showed off her dance moves, extremely confident of her character.

Frank had the hypnotized students sit in chairs for a majority of the show as well, but still could manage to have the crowd burst into laughter at the silly actions they made. He convinced a student they had their shoes on the wrong feet and he tricked a few students into believing their underwear was constantly shrinking. This lead to Frank asking them ridiculous questions over the microphone and the answers each student gave were extremely honest, making the pranks even funnier. One of the most positive reactions from the audience was when a student was told by Frank that the toilet paper in the bathroom stalls was filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Frank then instructed the student to grab as much money as he could, stuff it in his clothing, and return to the stage. The student followed through and the audience roared with laughter when the student came back on stage with toilet paper covering his body.

 

The show came to a close when the students were snapped out of hypnosis by Frank’s words over the speakers. As the students awoke from their deep hypnotic sleep, they were confused as to what happened in the past two hours. The boy with the toilet paper stuffed into his clothes seemed the most confused–for obvious reasons. After Frank’s last remarks for the night, students left the field house laughing and conversing about their favorite parts of the show. Erica Taras, a sophomore architecture major at RWU, stated, “The students made it really funny, and a lot of their own humor added to it. The hypnotist admitted he was making a lot of the material up on the spot, and you could tell!” The hypnotist show proved to be a fun way to start off the semester.