Friday, June 13, 2003 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

SHOW REVIEW: Rick Thomas refines, upgrades his afternoon show

Magician maintains family-friendly atmosphere in hourlong gig at the Tropicana

Rick Thomas, right, and audience member Cade Gober, 8, levitate Thomas' assistant in "The Magic of Rick Thomas" show at the Tropicana on Monday. Photo by JOHN LOCHER/REVIEW-JOURNAL

Summer brings dog days for many a performer, but it's peak season for those who have white tigers in the act.

The small fries headed out of Tropicana magician Rick Thomas' show this week made the lobby look like the bus stop at an elementary school, belying the national media's sweeping declarations that the family thing is dead and all of Las Vegas is naked again.

The truth is there is room for a little bit of everything on the Strip, and no one knows that better than Thomas. He's embarking on his seventh summer as an afternoon headliner, doing a family-friendly show that manages an innuendo or two but doesn't embarrass his Mormon upbringing.

It used to be that afternoon was the key part of the description; Thomas offered a streamlined, budget version of his expensive evening competitors, minus the elaborate sets and production numbers.

The problem was the show came off exactly like that. In time, Thomas has learned to better work with the limitations of sharing the large Tiffany Theatre stage with "Folies Bergere." He has made the act more about him, not about trying to make four dancers fill the stage, or having two white tigers stand in for Siegfried & Roy's multitudes.

And the illusions don't seem as stock as they did in the early days. This week's edition left out three of the old standards that can be seen in competing shows (not to mention his souvenir program, where they are still listed).

Two of the current 14 segments are driven by compelling story lines, and two more have fresh twists on standard setups.

The classic "cut the lovely assistant in half" gets the added measure of audience members coming onstage to hold onto leather restraints tied to the head and feet of Grace Weiss. It's a good head-scratcher that flies in the face of the ol' "must be fake feet" theory.

Weiss also gets levitated to soaring orchestral music, but the twist on this one is that Thomas shoots up into the sky to join her.

Thomas' 6-foot-4-inch performer height and Dudley Do-Right chin add an "all-American boy" appeal, helping him explain how he spent his childhood -- dancing with his sister in ballroom competitions -- with no apparent embarrassment, as though this was a perfectly normal upbringing.

The story sets up a chance for Thomas to strut his stuff dancing with a mop handle a la Fred Astaire, then making the mop transform into Weiss.

Thomas offers equally rapid sleights-of-hand with doves and parrots, and has found a distinctive illusion to justify the tigers without coming off as a poor man's Siegfried & Roy.

"The Incredible Shrinking Tiger" purports to downsize his big critter, Samson, into a cub version for a trip to Japan. It's another puzzler that puts some excitement back into magic, defying the usual "cabinet switch" in which you just know there's something fishy about those odd-sized boxes.

Add one bit that uses a youngster and another one that comically pits a married couple against one another, and you have a show that touches a lot of bases in a fast-moving hour.

Thomas' music could be fresher in places, and some of his stage costumes still look like the military uniforms of Liberace's Republican Guard.

But a new illusion that wasn't quite ready in time for summer vacation at least confronts the magician's square-guy image head-on. He will materialize atop sawhorses first in a black leather jacket, then give himself a motorcycle to match.

Photos of the stunt make him look less like someone cruising the Hard Rock Hotel than the Fonz in the waning seasons of "Happy Days."

But Thomas understands that you don't have to be hip to make it on the Strip. Still, if the competition chose to believe you can't do a show without the hip-hop beats and topless girls, he'd no doubt be happy to keep the real truth as secret as his magic.