More Cheese in Las Vegas? Grate! And P&T have Big Apple appeal

By John Katsilometes

Monday, March 23, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Over the weekend, The Kats Report Bureau was customarily mobile, spending ample time at Cirque du Soleil’s “One Night for One Drop” at the Mirage and the return of Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine at Sunset Station, among other check-ins in town.

Cheese and his swinging three-piece band again slathered a layer of Velveeta on such pop/rock classics as “Girls, Girls, Girls” by Motley Crue, “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot and “Tik Tock” by Ke$ha.

He swapped tux jackets throughout (from black to tiger stripe to floral) and kept his three-piece band on its toes. “Let’s do the one after Weezer,” he said at one point as music director and keyboardist Bobby Ricotta hurriedly shuffled sheet music.

Cheese would seem a great addition to the Station Casinos lineup or a venue such as Lounge at the Palms or Vinyl in the Hard Rock Hotel but has never been able to even start the conversation because of his busy tour schedule.

He says that he does plan to play Las Vegas more frequently. He did well at the box office, selling out the first show and nearly filling the second (about a dozen tickets short of capacity).

On Saturday night, I also stopped by for about 9 minutes to see how David Perrico’s Pop Strings show was holding up at Red Rocks Lounge, and the answer immediately was, “Quite nicely, Johnny.” Full house, again, for the no-admission-fee 11 p.m. show that blows up the room with a full string section.

The Cirque performance, the well-aged Cheese parody act and Perrico’s performance are propelling us to another crazy-active week in VegasVille.

Let’s rake it up:

• In July, Penn & Teller are taking their Las Vegas show back to New York, which is a diametrically opposite turn of events from when the duo premiered in 1993 at Bally’s Celebrity Room. The shows at Marquis Theater on Broadway are scheduled from July 7-Aug. 16 and mark P&T’s first headlining run on the Great White Way in 30 years.

“We’re Las Vegas now, but when we got here, we were so New York,” Penn Jillette said during an interview last week in the Monkey Room, the duo’s backstage den at the Rio. “It’ll be interesting to see how we’re received, and we’re going to do the full act, the hard stuff, with an intermission. … It’s going to be a bitch on wheels.” Or a cow disguised as a pygmy elephant on wheels.

• Worth tracking for any rock fan or fan of outdoor music festivals in VegasVille is The Rolling Stones’ tour announcement expected March 31 (the tour reportedly launches May 24 at Petco Park in San Diego). The tour is playing outdoor venues, some very big spaces, and has openings in June and through July.

By happenstance, so does MGM Resorts Festival Grounds, where the only events on the books at the moment are the Rock in Rio USA weekends May 8-9 and May 15-16. The official who fills those open dates, Chris Baldizan, has been looking for big-fly events to populate the grounds over the summer and fall. The Stones’ tour perfectly hits that schedule and those needs.

• Frankie Moreno has written reams of music and performed an enormous volume of originals and cover songs over the course of his career. But even by those standards, his shows at Smith Center’s Cabaret Jazz are singularly ambitious. Moreno is playing an entirely new set every week in these Tuesday night productions, dubbed “Under The Influence.” This requires Moreno and his band to learn 15 to 20 news songs each week and maybe cutting a couple of numbers to fit the show’s time format.

That’s somewhere from 200 to 215 songs that have not been in Moreno’s set at the Stratosphere. He’s also playing a couple of originals in these sets, and those, too, need to be rehearsed as those songs will not be duplicated. Added to the demands is the fact that the musicians are not using charts, or sheet music, onstage. Everyone needs to memorize every note. The whole process might require a different sort of chart — medical — by the time Moreno closes June 9.

• The Tenors of Rock were poking around VegasVille for a time and are due to return to town April 26 for a show at Backstage Bar & Billiards. This is the vocal group from the U.K. that blew through the city in November 2013, performing a showcase at Lounge at the Palms and stepping onstage with Moreno at the Strat and “Raiding the Rock Vault” at LVH.

The show at the live-music enclave on Fremont East will likely be no admission fee, 10:30 p.m. and possibly a toe-hold on something bigger in town. Priscilla Presley was in the audience for the Tenors’ show at the Palms and has been interested in this act for a while, and such an endorsement would be a rockin’ kind of thing.

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