Daring to Dream

The producer known as ND understands she is a slave to the BlackBerry on the table beside her. "We are totally a machine being," she says.

But she refuses to let her high-tech opus, set to open today at the Sahara, become a slave to automation. "So don't expect when you come to see my show that everything works," she cautions. "It might work, it might not work. Who cares?"

Why so nonchalant?

"Because it's called 'Raw Talent Live.' It's a raw production," she says. "That's the fun of it."

The new show, two years in the making, addresses a weighty philosophy: "Are we a machine being or a human being?" It creates its own mythology, complete with an Evil Queen and a Robot Snake Girl, to tell the story of something called The Laptop of Life, a portal to virtual worlds brought to life onstage.

"Whoever owns the Laptop of Life has the power to create the world you want to live in," ND explains.

It's a swing-for-the-fences gambit that could be a breakthrough hit or an epic failure, but at least will not be dismissed as another ho-hum, by-the-numbers Las Vegas revue.

The credit or blame will rest almost entirely on the shoulders of ND, a contagiously energetic German who not only wrote and directed the show but did the choreography, designed the costumes and composed much of the music as well.

And when she's not busy getting this show open after a month's delay, she's preparing ND's Space, a 21,000-square-foot club and concert venue scheduled for the Palazzo in April.

"Why would you be scared of what you can do?" she asks. "Just because people are jealous? Be true to who you are."

The producer still was credited at least occasionally by her full name, Nicole Durr, when she came to town in August 2004 with "Havana Night Club."

Her father is German entrepreneur Heinz Durr, and the family is known in Germany for a namesake company that is one of the world's main suppliers of automotive assembly systems, with 2007 sales revenues of about $1.5 billion.

By the time her Cuban revue came to the Stardust, however, Durr's main role in life was that of artistic leader and den mother to a troupe of 53 Cuban performers she toured around the world.

However, the U.S. debut of "Havana Night Club" at the Stardust was delayed by Cuban government foot-dragging in approving exit visas for the performers. The government might have suspected the next move, the mass defection of 43 performers in November 2004.

"Havana" closed in February 2006 and ND searched to relocate the show on the Strip while mounting an outdoor concert version in Miami. But eventually she gave up and let the company scatter (though some of the Cubans are part of the new show's multinational cast).

"I was tired," she says. "I wanted to create something that talks more about what's happening right now, where we live."

Keeping a number of artisans on retainer, she turned her Las Vegas office and rehearsal space into an "experimental lab," creating a wired-world update on the age-old struggle of good, evil and the duality of daily life, with stops on the way to comment on celebrity and environmental pollution.

Though she was able to stage fully produced numbers for potential backers, ND says she encountered a fair share of resistance before executive producer Bernie Yuman -- longtime manager of her friends Siegfried and Roy -- eventually steered the show into the Sahara.

"Let me put it this way. I got to know this town," she says. "It's easy for people to believe in you when everything is fine. But when you're fighting for it and when people don't see what you see, a lot of people don't believe in you anymore. Trust me, I've seen it."

The Strip hasn't seen a show so independent of committee thinking or outside control since "Fashionistas," a bizarre dance revue that also was the dream project of one creator -- porn mogul John Stagliano -- and one that was subsidized until he could no longer afford to keep it open.

ND has heavily remodeled an underperforming Sahara theater, removing rows of seats to extend a stage that now seems to fill up half the room. As she stands on this stage full of lighting trusses and video projection screens, it's clear "Raw Talent" is an expensive gamble.

But she says the final song, "Believe in Yourself," will remind audiences what she occasionally had to remind herself. "If you stop believing in yourself, trust me, nobody will believe in you."

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.