Lange opts for small doses of Las Vegas

When you're trying to think of who can command $50,000 per show in Las Vegas, Artie Lange might not be your first guess.

The hard-partying comedian has come a long way in six years as Howard Stern's radio sidekick. He is as upfront about his success as he is about his seedy Vegas adventures that become fuel for the radio show.

Lange says his Saturday visit to Beecher's Madhouse at the Hard Rock Hotel will be an exception to the big-money gigs he moved up to after playing Carnegie Hall last November during the New York Comedy Festival.

"I made two-hundred grand for two nights," Lange says of his Super Bowl weekend shows at Luxor. He also has learned to appreciate places with "nice comfortable seats, (where) people sit down and they listen to the comics. ... Ultimately, you just want people to sit down and listen."

He's not expecting that at Beacher's, a packaged party in which stand-up comedians are shuffled into a carnival atmosphere along with dancing girls and sideshow performers. Producer/host Jeff Beacher was in tight with the Morton family that built the Hard Rock, but the Madhouse events disappeared during the casino's transition to new owner Morgans Hotel Group.

The Madhouse is now back on a limited basis, with five scheduled so far this year. "It's not really conducive to do stand-up there. It's more like a crazed party," Lange says. "It's fun to do, but it's more like hosting a drunken AA meeting where everybody just fell off the wagon. I tend to drink and then it all gets crazy."

It all got crazy during Super Bowl weekend of 2005, when Lange got progressively pasted during his first Beacher's show and was barely coherent for the second. "I was probably on 40 pills as well as a gallon of booze. I used to snort heroin to get myself calm," he says. "In the summer of '05 I stopped doing all hard drugs."

Now his weight has ballooned to more than 300 pounds, one of the many personal details discussed at length on both the show and a Web site devoted to predicting the 39-year-old's demise.

"It's not fun for my mother to see, but what are you gonna do?" he says. "People want to be involved in everything; they want to be relevant somehow. So they start a Web site on when I'm gonna die."

"I'm definitely burned out without question," Lange says of a schedule that mixes a recurring role on "Rescue Me" with the Stern show and stand-up. "I go from a morning person during the week to a nocturnal comic on the weekends. It's just been nuts."

Despite his current success, Lange says the best he ever had it was the two years he spent on the "Norm" sitcom. "It was the greatest life, making about $35,000 a week, working about a 12-hour week, learning (bad) jokes that somebody else wrote and I just would say 'em. My family would watch it on TV every week and and would think I'm killin' because of the fake laugh."

If Lange got back into that kind of TV life, he could join the ranks of comedians who make weekend jaunts to Las Vegas for live dates. If he could survive it.

A visit or two each year is probably "more than enough," he says, considering "my vices and my tendency to do self-destructive (stuff). ... If God was gonna put the devil on Earth, in my eyes it would be a hot stripper with cocaine. And there's quite a few of those running around out there." ...

Risk is paying off for "Defending the Caveman." The Golden Nugget's long-form comic monologue -- a new genre for Las Vegas -- is doing enough business in the 600-seat theater to expand to seven days per week starting Aug. 7. That means nine performances per week instead of eight for the one-man show starring the tireless Kevin Burke.

"We didn't know what to expect downtown," says local producer John Bentham. What he and Golden Nugget officials have discovered is a surprisingly strong turnout from locals: about 26 percent of total ticket sales. Figures exclusive to the visitor segment show Golden Nugget guests account for about 40 percent of sales, 37 percent coming from the Strip and the rest from off-Strip hotels. ...

"Mamma Mia!" has recast four roles, with several new performers going into the Mandalay Bay musical on Monday. Fortunately, producers held on to Carol Linnea Johnson as lead character Donna and Vicki Van Tassel as her lusty pal.

But Donna's daughter, Sophie, will be played by Libby Winters, and the three guys who might be her dad will be played by Rob Sutton, Ron McClary and T. Scott Cunningham.

Mike Weatherford's entertainment column appears Thursdays and Sundays. Contact him at 383-0288 or e-mail him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.