This would have been nice five years ago.

On Monday, local PBS station KLVX-TV, Channel 10, ran "An Evening with Clint Holmes" as part of a pledge drive. Essentially a record of Holmes' nightly show at Harrah's, it seems ideal for public-TV pledge fare -- complete with the requisite rendition of "The Music of the Night"-- delivered to the perfect demographic of viewers who would seek out Holmes' show in Las Vegas.

"It's funny how these things work out," says the entertainer. "Here we are six weeks from closing, and we get probably the biggest exposure vehicle since we've been here."

But the singer says this in a lighthearted way. Instead of being bummed out that Harrah's opted not to extend his contract -- giving the showroom to Rita Rudner and, most likely Wayne Newton -- he is entirely fired up about something else.

I have reached him on the phone minutes after a table reading of his next venture, an autobiographical musical tentatively titled "Breathe."

"This is what I want to do for the next couple of years of my life," he says. The goal is to stage a rough workshop version here, then a regional theater version in another city, as Holmes did in 2002 with a Chicago production of a similar venture, "Comfortable Shoes." But Holmes didn't perform in that one, and he hopes this will be a vehicle to London's West End or Broadway.

"The whole play takes place in the form of my nightclub act, except it keeps getting interrupted, if you will," Holmes explains.

Holmes and Bill Fayne, his longtime musical collaborator, have a helpful third party in director Larry Moss, the acting coach who helped prepare Hilary Swank for "Boys Don't Cry" and Helen Hunt for "As Good As It Gets."

Moss says Holmes' act brought tears to his eyes. "I didn't know anybody was left who could do that art form. I guess I realized how much it meant to me," he says of the nightclub tradition he first witnessed with Nat King Cole and Lena Horne.

Though it covers similar ground, Moss says the new work is darker and more complex than "Shoes." It starts with "1944," a song Holmes performs at Harrah's about the story of his black G.I. father meeting his white British mother during World War II.

But then, Moss says, it will "really deconstruct the family and say, 'This is what really happened.' It delves into "the difficulty of bi-racial marriages and the result of the parent-child relationship... Clint's struggle with his own children as well as with his own parents."

Sounds like a far cry from "The Music of the Night."

But Holmes is excited. "It just feels like once I made the commitment that this is what I'm doing no matter what, all these things have happened. It's just like one of those things where the universe seems to be supporting the commitment we have to this."

Mike Weatherford's entertainment column appears Thursdays and Sundays. Contact him at 383-0288 or e-mail him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com