Work a Las Vegas Stage, Earn $150K in a Week

June 16, 2008 — -- You can lose $15,000 a day in Vegas without even hitting the tables. Instead, try taking the stage … if you dare.

"You're a freaking idiot if you try to do this," says comedian George Wallace, who has been making crowds laugh six nights a week for the past six years at Las Vegas' Flamingo Hotel. "I rent the stage, the staff and the advertising space — it's all on me."

What Wallace does is called 4-Walling, a process whereby an entertainer rents a stage for at least one year and pays for all his or her own promotion. What the performer gets in return is ticket sales.

David Saxe, the producer of more than 150 Vegas shows, said that even with stage rent running at $10,000 to $20,000 per week, one-person acts with low overheads can make $150,000 a week.

"But if you bomb," he said, "then you can end up losing $15,000 every night on a one-year contract."

In today's tough economy, 4-Walling is no small gamble. Sixty-three percent of Las Vegas visitors attended shows in 2007, according to Kris Tibbs, senior research analyst at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. That represents a significant decline from all previous years, including 2006 — when show attendance was 13 percent higher — and 2004, when it was 19 percent higher.

Hotels, meanwhile, have taken a hard-line approach when it comes to working with 4-Wall shows.

"Four-Wall used to include in-house advertising and in-house ushers," Saxe said. "Now it just means, 'Here's the room, now pay us the rent.'"

To 4-Wall is not a new phenomenon: It has been around since the late 1980s, when the mob was replaced by corporate bean counters. They decided money was being lost in the showroom, with hotels paying $500,000 a week to the Streisands and Sinatras of the world and struggling to recoup that outlay.

Today, there's huge demand from performers looking for stage space, which gives hotels the luxury of changing shows when they please. While acts like Wallace are relatively affordable, the speculation is that big production shows like Spamalot and Cirque du Soleil may prove too expensive for the visiting public.