By Steve Friess, Photographs: Francis & Francis

ll you need to know about Felix Rappaport is this: He's the guy who said no to Guy Laliberté. Back around 2001, the Cirque du Soleil chief was courting Rappaport, hoping to persuade the newly minted president of the flailing New York-New York Hotel & Casino that the next Cirque production to come to Vegas ought to be a clown show.

Rappaport flew to Paris to check out the show that was inspiring Laliberté's vision, then came home and told the mastermind behind two of the biggest hits in Strip history— Oand Mystère—that it wasn't going to work. Indeed, the fact that Laliberté even thought that a kid-friendly clown show was a good fit for New York-New York was, in Rappaport's mind, the root of the property's image problem.

"I told them I wanted something more hip, sexier and edgier," recalls Rappaport of his instructions to Cirque's brass, citing three adjectives that reflected what he wanted not only in his resident show but also from the entire Manhattan-themed resort. That directive yielded Zumanity—an adults-only, European-style cabaret featuring cutting-edge alternative sexual situations never before seen in mainstream live theater. "It did exactly what I wanted it to do." That turnaround earned 52-year-old Rappaport a reputation in Las Vegas as the Strip's Mr. Fix-It and a new, even greater challenge: to pull off a similar revolution at Luxor, another ailing, underperforming Vegas hotel-casino with an iconic look.

The jury is still out on that effort, of course, since Rappaport has only been on the job as president and COO there since late 2005. But if the first ambitious phase of his plans— the new nightclub LAX, which recently replaced Ra; a new Cirque du Soleil production starring Criss Angel, which occupies the site that formerly housed Blue Man Group and Hairspray; and several new and redesigned bars, lounges and casinos—is any indication, Rappaport clearly believes a bold new vision can return the 14-year-old pyramid-shaped MGM Mirage resort to glory. Two more phases are to come, including plans to rid the property of much of its Egyptian artifice and a multimillion-dollar effort to upgrade the hotel's 4,408 rooms, which will take Rappaport the rest of the decade.

"What do people like to do? They like to eat; they like to gamble; they like to party; they like to see shows," Rappaport says. "What we do is not rocket science." Don't tell that to the people who operated the resort before Rappaport, who came to Luxor after MGM Mirage took it over in 2005 as part of the buy-out of Mandalay Resort Group. He inherited a run-down hotel (Rappaport refers to it as having been "run like a dormitory, and a poorly run dormitory at that") with leaky roofs, broken pool areas caked in bird dung, and a nightclub, Ra, which was ahead of its time when it opened in the 1990s but was "almost dangerous" by 2005. "At the end, they were no longer high-end competitors, and they allowed too many kids to come in. It wasn't the safest environment."

These challenges excite Rappaport, a Philadelphia native whose parents divorced when he was five and who was raised with a brother by his schoolteacher mother. He put himself through college, received a graduate business degree from Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, and went to work out of school, running an American Red Cross office in Burlington, New Jersey.

In 1980, a friend encouraged Rappaport to apply for various administrative jobs at a handful of new hotel-casinos in Atlantic City. He landed several interviews and three job offers, and subsequently took a position as a personnel-services administrator at the Brighton Hotel and Casino, which later became the Sands. Rappaport put in a couple of years at the Brighton before moving on to Philadelphia, where he spent the rest of the decade rising through the ranks in that city's hotel business, eventually becoming general manager of a Radisson in Center City, Philadelphia. Along the way, he met Mary Louise, his future wife, when she was the manager of a restaurant at one of his hotels ...

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