1923 Burlesque lops burlesque as Holly Madison paints stark picture of ‘Rabbit Hole’

By John Katsilometes

Wednesday, June 10, 2015 | 7 p.m.

Less than two weeks before Holly Madison’s book about her tumultuous time at the Playboy Mansion is to be released, the club she helped launch at Mandalay Bay is announcing a “repositioning.”

The speakeasy-styled club at Mandalay Bay known most recently as 1923 Bourbon & Burlesque, and which opened as 1923 Bourbon & Burlesque by Holly Madison, has cut “burlesque” from its programming and temporarily gone dark. The new club is to be called 1923 Bourbon Bar, reopening to the public from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. Saturday. The club was dark last weekend after informing its collection of contracted dancers June 3 that they would no longer be performing at the nightspot.

Noel Bowman, president of Minus 5 Management, which owns the club in a business partnership with the hotel, said in an email that the new 1923 would feature a “savvy Bourbon list and scratch craft cocktails in a cool underground environment.” The club is to be open for private events during the week, as Bowman says the nightspot has been “crushing it” for such functions. The most obvious difference is no live entertainment in the club in favor of jazz-styled atmospheric music.

When 1923 opened in the spring of 2014, Madison was a creative partner and co-producer of the shows staged in the club. Among the original performers were Las Vegas lounge favorite Skye Dee Miles, a high-powered band of experienced local players and dancers with ample stage experience in such productions as “Vegas! The Show” and “Peepshow.” But, eventually, the band and Miles were let go, and the club’s entertainment was primarily dancers in burlesque-style costumes performing to tracked music.

Madison effectively split from the club around the summer of 2014 and was not seen in the club at all after May. She confirmed her decision to separate herself from operations last December. In February, she filed a pair of lawsuits against the club’s operators (Bowman, general manager Avi Kopelman and club executives Robert W. Sabes and Robert Fry were named in the litigation), charging that they had covertly video recorded dancers who performed at the club as they changed costumes backstage. That legal action is continuing.

Attorneys representing the nightclub in those complaints countered that Madison was performing a “publicity stunt” to promote her upcoming book. Excerpts from that book, titled “Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny,” were posted online today by People.com. The book is due for widespread release June 23.

In this early sampling, Madison describes a scene in which she was mired in the “depth of my depression” and locked in a relationship with a man old enough to be her grandfather (Hugh Hefner, of course, now 89) who would not miss her if she were gone. She writes that she overheard Hefner refer to her as “just another blonde” and had no friends aside from another of Hefner’s girlfriends, Bridget Marquardt.

Madison writes that she mulled the possibility of committing suicide while in the bathtub, relating, “If I just put my head under water and take a deep breath in, it would be all over. … Maybe it was the pot and the alcohol, but drowning myself seemed like the logical way to escape this ridiculous life.”

This was in 2002, when Madison, Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson were cast members on the E! reality-TV show “The Girls Next Door” and more than six years before Madison moved to Las Vegas. She says she will host a book signing in town sometime in early July.

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