Steve Wyrick is ever the magician, but he learned a lot about design as he put personal touches on the bar and other features of his new club. Photos by John Gurzinski. Steve Wyrick's theater at the Desert Passage mall will be home to as many as four shows as well as a lounge and nightclub.

And you thought a magician's job was all about how to saw a lady in half. Steve Wyrick figured out how to swap a table candle for a stripper's pole.

That little conversion trick -- pull the candle to reveal fitted ring for pole -- is an actual feature of Wyrick's new $35 million theater and nightclub at the Aladdin's Desert Passage mall. Though Wyrick is finally selling tickets for his show, "Steve Wyrick -- Real Magic," building a home for it preoccupied him for the better part of a year.

Wyrick learned more than he ever wanted to about change orders and construction delays, some of it too late to keep the project on track for its planned November opening. Expensive billboards near the airport advertised a show no one could see.

He also discovered $35 million doesn't get the respect it used to. Not when the $7 billion Project CityCenter is going up on the other side of the Strip.

"Even though it's a huge thing to me, in the general construction of Las Vegas, $35 million is just a drop in the bucket," Wyrick says. "In Dallas it would be a huge deal, but in Las Vegas it just doesn't warrant the attention you would expect it to from a contractor."

In spite of all that, Wyrick has achieved what he believes to be a Las Vegas first. "No one has ever done a project themselves on this level. At least I'm not aware of a headliner doing something like this."

A 500-seat theater will be home to Wyrick and at least two other shows: Longtime ventriloquist Ronn Lucas will perform in the early afternoons starting Saturday, and, later this month, Filipino pop star Martin Nievera will have a "happy hour" slot. A long-form comedy piece, "Defending the Caveman," abandoned a 10:30 p.m. berth during the construction delays; Wyrick says he will announce a new tenant soon.

"Real Magic" promises large-scale illusions in an intimate setting. But even after building the theater, Wyrick still has his work cut out for him. Along with competition from two afternoon magic shows as well as Lance Burton and -- for much of the year -- David Copperfield, future months could bring a Criss Angel and Cirque du Soleil co-production to the Luxor. There's even talk of a new magic show featuring Dutch illusionist Hans Klok moving in right next door, at the Aladdin's 7,000-seat concert hall.

But the new complex also is hedging its bet by trying to grab a piece of the booming nightclub industry. The theater lobby is an ultralounge dubbed Triq. Within a month or so, Wyrick envisions the whole complex transforming into a nightclub once the evening's ticketed entertainment ends, with the stage serving as the main dance floor.

This is the third venue Wyrick has inaugurated since 2000, but the first he and his primary investor -- Texas businessman B.B. Barr -- have financed without a casino partner. It's a futures bet on the success of the Aladdin's planned relaunch as Planet Hollywood, and on a time-share and condominium tower under construction just a few yards beyond the new theater.

Wyrick compares his do-it-yourself approach to the business models of celebrity chefs who "create a restaurant with a partnership, in some cases financial and some cases a marketing alignment with a property ... It's just never been done in entertainment, but in the food world it's done all the time."

The Texas-born magician has been writing his own ticket since he came off the convention and trade show circuit to open his show downtown at the Lady Luck in 1997. Then-owner Andrew Tompkins offered a generous deal, paying for advertising and service staff while Wyrick kept the box office gate. "It was a deal in which he knew I could make money. It wasn't one-sided," he says.

Wyrick moved on to a similar arrangement at the Sahara in 2000, when the late William Bennett built a $56 million theater and Wyrick put up $7 million for the show.

The Sahara production offered big sets and props -- including an airplane and helicopter -- and for a time fit well into the Sahara's push for a family-oriented middle market. But support for the show eroded after Bennett's death in 2002, and Wyrick moved on the next year, financing the buildout of a small theater inside the Aladdin.

That show ran until 2005, when former executives of Clear Channel Entertainment took over the space to build a larger venue for a show by the producers of "Stomp." Hampered by the little room's lack of a flyloft or wing space, Wyrick more than compensated by making his new stage 50 feet wide.

The stage and backstage area, he says, take up more space than the seating area for the audience. "It's big enough so that you feel like you're seeing a mega-show, but the audience is small and warm and intimate enough to feel special."

Other magicians have tigers or comedy for instant identification. Wyrick's defining touch is a flair for stagecraft and illusions grounded in a theatrical setting. "I've always been about full production. If I have an illusion, it needs to have a set and correct lighting and sound, everything to embellish it," he says. "It's not a box show, where every other trick is a box."

The new stage also has more than 200 moving lights and a giant LED screen for high-definition backdrops, not unlike Celine Dion's "A New Day."

Overseeing nearly every detail of designing a show and club suited the part of Wyrick that makes a hobby of buying and restoring vintage neon signs. He proudly points out the white onyx bartops in Triq, or the lower bar's red glass chips, embossed in acrylic and lighted from behind -- his idea.

"I'm a neat-freak. People come to my house and say it doesn't look like anyone really lives there," he says.

Now he hopes they don't say that about his theater.