Rick Thomas not only levitates Christina Hurley in a climactic sequence to his afternoon show at the Stardust, he joins her in the air moments later. Photo by Jane Kalinowsky.

Hurry! See this show before the tiger grows up.

No sleight-of-hand that Rick Thomas pulls onstage gets quite the "Ahhh" from the audience as the moment when the magician bottle-feeds the 5-month-old tiger cub used in one of his illusions.

So much for any thought of putting the white-tiger thing on ice and moving Las Vegas magic beyond the Siegfried & Roy era. Thomas not only makes exotic animals a big part of his 8-year-old afternoon show, but he doubled the number of big critters on the Strip by leaving the Tropicana. As easily as sawing a cabinet in half, the hotel wasted no time drafting Dirk Arthur and his tigers as a replacement.

Thomas moved his afternoon show to the Stardust because he couldn't get straight answers on just how much longer the Tropicana will be in business. He opened in the Stardust's vintage showroom two months ago, and has been trying to rebuild his family-friendly show and audience on the north end of the Strip.

The good news is that Thomas can hold his own with the tigers. The adult ones, anyway.

Working around headliners and the "Havana Night Club" revue, Thomas now has his technically complex revue back to the level it was at the Trop, and he says there is still more to come during the summer, his peak season. Even as is, Thomas does justice to what has become the "Vegas-style" magic tradition and offers a solid entertainment bargain in the process.

In fact, Thomas and Harrah's Mac King make good counterparts for people reeling with sticker shock at evening-show prices. You can see both for less than the price of a David Copperfield ticket, and they really don't overlap. King keeps his act simple and centered around the comedy, while Thomas gives you the full production with animals and big stage illusions.

He also gives you more personality than Arthur's fast-moving but more generic-feeling option. The 6-foot, 4-inch magician with the lantern jaw -- he looks as though he could be related to Jay Leno -- starts with a simple "I'm Rick Thomas and I promise you a great day." But by the end of the 65-minute show, you've seen grainy home movies of him ballroom dancing with his sister in competitions as a youth.

You may have seen the big illusions before, but Thomas at least gives them little twists. When the Lovely Assistant (Christina Hurley) is put into a cage and turned into a tiger, you see her arms poking through the concealing fabric until the last instant before the switch.

When another Lovely Assistant (Bonnie Skilton) is put into a coffin-like box and bisected, the trick is spruced up by audience members' holding the straps latched to her neck and feet. Levitations and transformations are given a clever context within the ballroom dancing scenario, in which Thomas explains he had to emulate the Fred Astaire hatrack scene in "Royal Wedding" by practicing with a microphone stand and wig as a lonely youth, but now is able to conjure a real live girl.

None of this is what you would call cutting-edge, and some of it -- particularly the early part of the show -- is so overly familiar that it's ripe for a comic twist. By now so many magicians have opened their act by appearing in fogged-up glass cabinets that I'm surprised Penn & Teller haven't based a bit on it.

And the waistcoat Thomas wears for the bird part of the act has these giant, shovel-like cuffs that look like they could be used to trench a yard for sprinkler pipe. Gee, where do you ya think the birds come from?

But don't point this out to any of the youngsters who may be seeing their first Las Vegas magic show. Thomas has said offstage that the magician's job is to charm the audience into forgetting about figuring out the tricks. By the time he tells the touching story of an encounter with a terminally ill girl, or shows how audience "volunteers" can be tougher to train than tigers, he has succeeded.

Still, it's a competitive world on the Strip, so don't count on him being without a tiger cub any longer than he has to.