Powerhouse Route 91 Harvest plays pick-a-parcel in return to the Village

By John Katsilometes

Friday, Jan. 22, 2016 | 1:11 p.m.

Brian O’Connell remembers a night three years ago in Las Vegas when Chris Baldizan and he gazed down at the Strip from the deck of the Foundation Room at Mandalay Bay.

Baldizan is the senior vice president of entertainment at MGM Resorts. O’Connell runs the division of the entertainment production and booking company Live Nation that stages country music concerts.

Baldizan gestured to an underdeveloped lot below and spoke with great passion of staging shows on that darkened parcel.

“To me that space had always been a parking lot,” O’Connell says during a phone conversation from Nashville. “It was where I parked my bus for the ACM Awards. But Chris, bless him, had a vision and pulled the rip cord.”

Three years on, that space is known as Las Vegas Village and is home to the Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival, one of the great success stories in Las Vegas entertainment in recent memory.

The festival sold out last year, capping at 25,000 fans on that 15 acres, and seems to have blunted the idea of moving farther north to the far-larger Las Vegas Festival Grounds.

On Thursday, the festival has announced the artists for the Sept. 30-Oct. 2 event, trumpeting the type of robust lineup of superstars fans have come to expect in its short history. Those set to appear include Luke Bryan, Toby Keith, Brad Paisley, Little Big Town, Chris Young, Billy Currington, Lindsay Ell, Tyler Farr, Granger Smith featuring Earl Dibbles Jr., Jana Kramer, Dustin Lynch, David Nail and Travis Tritt.

Yet more stars are to be announced, and passes for the festival are on sale now, with prices at $219, $359 and $599, at RT91Harvest.com.

Before the festival’s debut in 2013, officials at property owner MGM Resorts and their booking partners at Live Nation were unsure of how the show and space would fit.

The results?

“We’ve outkicked our coverage,” O’Connell says using a term in football when a kicking team races to catch up with a long punt. “When we started Route 91, we planned it fast, in like 100 days. It was all very fast developing. But now, it is a big success; it is very popular, and that spot is where it is. It feels right in that spot.”

Certainly, the festival can expect to bring a healthy crowd to a spot on the Strip that is bristling with dazzling resorts. Surrounding the festival are Luxor, Mandalay Bay, Excalibur, New York-New York, Tropicana and MGM Grand. The photos posted on social media of these famous hotel-casinos, with the sun setting in the background and the main stage in the foreground, are spectacular.

But Route 91 has often been held up as the chief example of a show that could outgrow its original space at the Village and move north to Las Vegas Festival grounds at the southwest corner of Sahara and the Strip. That space also is a property of MGM Resorts and is thirsty for programming. Before last year’s Route 91 Festival, Baldizan expressly said he wanted to move the festival to the Festival Grounds as early as this year.

But the show’s promoter does not want to move. Not yet, at least.

“Has this come up? Yes, it has, and it’s a great conversation to have,” O’Connell says. “Chris knows how I feel about this. Progress is a good thing, absolutely, but so is exclusivity. That spot is known as the only spot you can see Route 91, and fans are becoming used to that as a destination. Until we sell it out on the on-sale morning, when demand exceeds supply, we should stay where we are. That’s how I look at.”

There is a concern that the box office appeal of the show at the Village might not transfer to the larger site at the Festival Grounds. There are no guarantees that a show that sells 25,000 tickets at a 15-acre site will sell that at a new venue, even if the options are parcels on opposite ends of the Strip.

“This goes back to the idea that if you can’t get a ticket that this is a great place to be,” O’Connell says. “We have a saying in the South: Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. We can be really, really, really good at what we do right where we are and make it exclusive.

“I am really happy where we are.”

It’s called being in the catbird seat, and whether it’s looking down from Foundation Room or VIP perch at Route 91, it’s a good place to be.

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.