Friday, June 21, 2002 | 9:09 a.m.
Who: David Brenner and Kevin Pollak.
When: 9 p.m., through Sunday.
Where: Paris Las Vegas' Le Theatre Des Arts.
Tickets: $55.
Information: 946-7000.
Comedian David Brenner, a Las Vegas resident for almost two years, was going to move back to New York City after his lengthy engagement at the Golden Nugget drew to an end last November.
"I had moved the family to Vegas," said Brenner, who will be performing at Paris Las Vegas with actor/comedian Kevin Pollak through Sunday. "I originally was going to be at the Nugget for eight weeks, and it ended up being 48 weeks."
He planned on the family staying here through last summer, then he would take them back to New York to live in an apartment while he finished out his contract at the Nugget.
The move was scheduled for Sept. 7.
"Then I thought, 'Why am I running back home?' " Brenner said.
He has performed in Vegas too many times to count, so he feels at home here. The location is good. Living conditions are not bad.
"So I canceled the loft apartment (in New York) and registered my kids in school here," Brenner said.
If he had followed through with his plans to take his wife and children to New York, they would have been there on Sept. 11. His two children would have been enrolled in Public School 234 in south Manhattan, just three blocks from the World Trade Center.
Brenner's brush with disaster has not affected him. The only immediate impact has been to keep him on the road more than he has been in recent years.
"I worked (at the Nugget) the night of Sept. 11," he recalled. "The showroom was only about 25-percent full. The next night was a little better, but it still wasn't normal."
On Sept. 14 he performed at the 1,200-seat Cahuilla Showroom of the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
"All of the seats were full," Brenner said.
When he returned to the Nugget, the room was still more than half empty.
"I realized then that Americans were terrified to leave their cities, but they needed to leave their homes and laugh," Brenner said.
That was when he decided to get back on the road as soon as his contract with the Nugget ended.
"I called my agent and told him that if the people wouldn't come to me, I would go to them," Brenner said.
He put together a national tour that started in December and was to end in mid-January -- but he has been on the road ever since.
"I've never had such appreciative audiences in my life," Brenner said.
But being on the road to reach those audiences is a different matter.
"It's not traveling," Brenner said. "It's combat. It's you versus the security idiots. You're not a traveler, you're a combatant."
The combat can be tiresome, and Brenner would like to find a more permanent venue in Las Vegas. He thought he had found it at the Nugget, but it was too far from the Strip.
"I went into the Nugget for one singular purpose," he said. "I heard they were going to turn the showroom into a buffet. I had worked there under the tutelage of Steve Wynn.
"Frank Sinatra performed there, and Dolly Parton. There were some heavy hitters at the Nugget's showroom at one time. The idea of people there with 5-foot-wide rear ends in Spandex asking for extra bacon floored me. So I set up a meeting with the Nugget and they let me go in for eight weeks to prove I was viable. And that turned into 48 weeks."
But demographically, Brenner says he is most popular with high-rollers -- who rarely venture downtown.
"My experience is that I'm a high-roller guy," he said. "I'm a Strip guy. My audiences are well-groomed and well-heeled."
Brenner said more than 72 percent of those who came to see his show at the Nugget were from the high end of the Strip.
"If I could pick my druthers I'd take one of the high-priced hotels on the upper end of the Strip for 40 to 44 weeks a year," he said. "I would do one or two shows a night, bringing in the high-rollers.
"Let me stay here for the next five years, and I'll be doing the Danny Gans thing, the Wayne Newton thing. Make me a Las Vegas regular, but not a permanent fixture because I also want to travel around the country."
Brenner sounds like a pitchman when he talks about having his own room, a la Rita Rudner at New York-New York's Cabaret Theatre.
"My agent is talking to people," he said. "There's already been a response. I'm hoping an entertainment director on the high end of the Strip says 'David Brenner is great. He brings in high-rollers. Let's give him a room, some space. Let's do a Rita Rudner thing.'
"In every one of those hotels, there must be 5-or-6,000 square feet of space they could turn into a showroom where I could perform, just to see if we can make some money.
"If the boys (mob) were stilling running the town it would be different. I was a young god when I first started. They brought me back to their showrooms because the casino drop (amount of money gambled) went way up."
Brenner said he met with corporate executives from one casino who said each family coming to Vegas "had 4.2 human beings, stayed 2.6 days and spent 98.3 percent of the money they brought."
"What are they talking about?" he said. "Do you think Bugsy Siegel analyzed it to that degree? He just said, 'Give the people gambling, liquor, good food and stars and that's how we'll succeed.' And it worked."
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