So picture this: July 4, 2009, the Strip outside Planet Hollywood, and a crowd’s gathered for a stunt called “Death Drop” — a locked box hoisted somewhere between eighty and a hundred and twenty feet in the air, suspended over a bed of flaming spikes, rigged to burn itself free on live ropes while the crowd watches from the sidewalk below. The plan is for magician Steve Wyrick to make a dramatic helicopter entrance right as the escape completes. He isn’t in the box. His stunt double, Jeffrey Jay, is. The black cloth shielding the rig catches fire early and catches hard — Jay’s later lawsuit would claim the cloth had been carelessly painted with something flammable earlier that same day — and it takes crew more than a minute to get the flames out before the fire department pulls the whole box down. News coverage that week calls it minor, a cast member treated by paramedics on scene. Jay’s own lawsuit, filed a few weeks later, describes it very differently: internal and external burns, “great pain, suffering and anxiety,” injuries he says kept him from working again. Nobody’s ever reported how that lawsuit ended.
To understand how Steve Wyrick ended up standing next to a burning box on the Strip, you have to go back to where he started, because the rise is as unlikely as the collapse. He grew up idolizing David Copperfield off the TV specials, bombed his first real convention performance so badly he later called it a train wreck, and rented a 250-seat theater in Branson, Missouri, in the early ’90s on a $5,000 loan from his own mother. He made it to Vegas. By 1999 he’d talked Sahara owner Bill Bennett into building him a custom 860-seat, $56 million theater on an eight-and-a-half-year contract — and the show closed after two. He moved to the Aladdin in 2003, then landed the deal that should have been the real one: a purpose-built $35 million, 435-seat theater at the newly rebranded Planet Hollywood, opening in 2007, built around his signature trick of making a twelve-ton Learjet vanish. Critics were never kind — one called demanding a refund “the perfect time” to do it; a Review-Journal columnist accused him of lifting Copperfield’s own material and mannerisms wholesale. None of that stopped the money from finding him, for a while. It just meant the money was chasing a showman the reviews never actually backed.
The fire didn’t end it, not directly — that’s worth being precise about, because the tidier version of this story wants the flames to be the whole cause and they aren’t. Wyrick’s Planet Hollywood theater kept running for another five months after Jeffrey Jay walked out of that box, then closed quietly in December 2009 when he stopped paying rent. Miracle Mile Shops repossessed the $16 million venue that January. By May 2010 he’d filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy listing $54,353,748 in liabilities against $93,157 in assets — at the time of filing, by his own account, twenty dollars in his pocket and forty-five dollars and change in the bank. He was reportedly staying at his former wardrobe assistant’s house, living on checks from his mother, the same mother whose $5,000 had started the whole thing twenty years earlier. Las Vegas Weekly’s postmortem on the whole run was blunt about what had actually kept him afloat as long as it did: it wasn’t the magic. It was a strong resemblance to a bigger star, a booming pre-2008 economy willing to bankroll almost anything with a marquee attached, and the simple fact that this was Vegas, where investors have always been more willing to bet on a story than check the math behind it.
Here’s the part that makes the whole thing land differently: Wyrick wasn’t the first act to go bust on that exact stage. He was just the latest.
The building had been doing this since 1966. It opened that year as the Aladdin, Vegas’s first major new Strip resort in almost a decade, with a modest 500-seat showroom that was real but never quite top-tier — nothing like the Sands or the Riviera in their Rat Pack prime. It didn’t become a genuinely major entertainment address until a decade later, when a 1976 expansion built the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts and opened it with five sold-out Neil Diamond shows worth $750,000. Three years after that, Nevada gaming regulators shut the entire hotel down — not the theater, the whole property, licenses stripped after four men were convicted of illegally controlling it. Wayne Newton and a partner bought it and reopened it in 1980. It went bankrupt again in 1984. And again in 1989, when its Japanese owner died mid-collapse. It closed for good — or so it seemed — in 1997, and the original tower came down in a scheduled implosion on April 27, 1998. For three straight years after that, nothing stood there at all. A new $1.4 billion Aladdin finally reopened in August 2000, and it went bankrupt too, within a year. A former Nevada Gaming Commissioner, looking back on the whole run of it decades later, put it about as plainly as a regulator ever puts anything on the record: “It’s like it was cursed.”
The building’s luck didn’t actually turn until the same year Wyrick’s theater opened inside it. In 2007, after yet another sale and a renovation, the whole property finally shed the Aladdin name for good and became Planet Hollywood — and the venue that had spent forty years opening big and collapsing found its actual, lasting boom a few years later, after Wyrick himself was already gone. Britney Spears’ “Piece of Me” ran 248 sold-out shows in that same theater from 2013 to 2017. Jennifer Lopez, Gwen Stefani, Shania Twain, and a rotating cast of the Strip’s biggest modern residencies followed her into the same room, under the same roof that Nevada’s own government once had to physically shut down.
Both stories end up in the same place, in a way: a magician who bet everything on a boom that couldn’t hold, and a building that had already gone bust three separate times before he ever got there, both of them fighting to get back up on the same stage. The building managed it. Wyrick tried — a brief run at the Las Vegas Hilton that closed after six weeks, some shows back in Branson, where all of this had started on his mother’s money — but he never got back anywhere close to that Planet Hollywood theater again. The Learjet trick that made him famous and the flaming box that helped finish him both happened inside a resort that had already taught two generations of owners the same lesson before Wyrick ever showed up to learn it himself: this particular stage has never once let anybody keep what it gave them.