“Madness” to overtake Las Vegas

By Joe Brown

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 | 5:27 p.m.

Just the other day I was wondering why "Shear Madness" has never played Las Vegas. When I lived in Washington, D.C., it seemed like every actor (and stage manager) I knew had done some time in the semi-improvised farce -- after nearly 20 years, the show is still running, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, no less.

Set in a beauty parlor, the comedy whodunit holds the Guinness Book record as the first, second and third longest-running play in the history of American theater. Make of that what you will. It's actually a very clever show, and a natural for a tourist town.

Careful what you wish for: "Shear Madness" arrives in Vegas this fall, with a just-announced seven-year deal at the Town Square mega-mall, and a projected September opening date.

The producers are custom-building a 300-seat theater at Town Square (facing the Yard House Restaurant, on the first floor of the movieplex). Bruce Jordan, who created and directed the original show, will set the Town Square version in present-day Vegas, involving audience members as armchair detectives to help solve the scissor-stabbing murder of a famed concert pianist who lives above the Shear Madness hairstyling salon.

Including D.C., "Shear Madness" currently has three permanent productions in the United States, with Boston and Chicago, with companies in Spain, Greece, Poland, and Seoul, Korea. The show has been produced in more than 37 U.S. cities, has been translated into 11 foreign languages and has been seen by a worldwide audience of more than 8.5 million.

Tickets go on sale July 1, (at $39.95, $54.95, $69.95 and a limited selection at $20 plus tax) at Vegas.com.

Looks like there's a mini-trend of interactive theater developing here: We've already got productions of "Joey and Maria's Comedy Italian Wedding" and "The Soprano's Last Supper," and posters have been hinting that "Tamara" will open someday at the Venetian. That show, which opened in Toronto in 1981, is an artsy murder mystery performed in a large house (in New York, at the Seventh Regent Armory) with ten actors performing simultaneous scenes in a dozen different rooms; the audience chooses which actors to follow. It was called "a living movie" when it played New York in 1987; it will most likely be much shorter here.

Or should the trend be called "mall theater"? Some say that a space at the Forum Shops is being readied to house the musical "Jekyll & Hyde," which ran for nearly four years on Broadway, and also inspired a "haunted" restaurant in New York.

Maybe if I wish real hard, I can get a production of San Francisco's beloved and long-running "Beach Blanket Babylon" to materialize here in Vegas...