Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

ACM Awards returns to Las Vegas seeking Strip takeover

2016 ACM Awards Hosts Luke Bryan, Dierks Bentley

Tom Donoghue / DonoghuePhotography.com

2016 ACM Awards hosts Luke Bryan and Dierks Bentley on Friday, April 1, 2016, at MGM Grand.

ACM Hosts Luke Bryan and Dierks Bentley

2016 ACM Awards hosts Luke Bryan and Dierks Bentley on Friday, April 1, 2016, at MGM Grand. Launch slideshow »

2014 ACM Awards: Photo Room

George Strait, winner of the Entertainer of the Year award, poses in the photo room during the 49th Academy of Country Music Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena Sunday, April 6, 2014. Launch slideshow »

2013 ACM Awards at MGM Grand

Luke Bryan holds his awards for Entertainer of the Year and Vocal Event of the Year at the 48th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards at MGM Grand on Sunday, April 7, 2013. Launch slideshow »

When the Academy of Country Music Awards uprooted from its Las Vegas home for its 50th anniversary show at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, members of the ACM Board of Directors asked a pertinent question:

“How do we go from Dallas, where we had 70,000 fans at the show, to Las Vegas, where we have 11,000?”

Good question, right? Bob Romeo’s answer is simple: “We make the ACMs big by supersizing it at different places.”

Romeo is planning not only for this weekend but for the future in Las Vegas as the ACM Awards returns to MGM Grand Garden Arena on Sunday (the tape-delayed telecast is set for 8 p.m. on CBS). The ACM Awards complementary event, the ACM Party for a Cause festival, runs tonight through Sunday at Las Vegas Festival Grounds.

The CBS telecast, co-hosted by Luke Bryan and Dierks Bentley, is loaded with stars and inventive pairings, with Katy Perry and Dolly Parton performing a medley of “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colors,” as Perry sports a 1970s-era Parton dress.

Billy Gibbons, Miranda Lambert and Keith Urban charge through ZZ Top’s “Tush,” and Nick Jonas teams with Kelsea Ballerini on a yet-unannounced number.

The full lineup of performers is characteristically brimming with country superstars: Jason Aldean, Bentley, Bryan, Cam, Kenny Chesney, Eric Church, Brett Eldredge, Sam Hunt, Charles Kelley, Tim McGraw, Thomas Rhett, Blake Shelton, Chris Stapleton, Cole Swindell, Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban, Florida Georgia Line and Old Dominion.

It’s all great TV, but the ACM Awards live experience is an entirely different scope and challenge.

With about 18,000 tickets sold for the Party for a Cause and 11,000 in the house (a mix of ticket-buyers and the sponsors’ invited guests), ACM Awards Weekend in Las Vegas brushes 30,000 live attendees over two major venues on opposite ends of the Strip.

As Romeo all but promises, this is the final ACM Awards telecast from MGM Grand Garden Arena. Next year, ACM producers Dick Clark Productions and he are planning to relocate to T-Mobile Arena. It is expected that Dick Clark Productions is planning to host the 2016 Billboard Music Awards at T-Mobile as a way to prep the arena for the ACM Awards in 2017.

The only sticking point to the ACM Awards’ move across the Strip, as Romeo points out, is a host hotel close to T-Mobile, which sits between Monte Carlo and New York-New York.

“If we go there, we have to consider a new host hotel that isn’t MGM Grand because the magic barrier here is Las Vegas Boulevard. That creates a problem logistically for our artists,” Romeo said during a conversation at MGM Grand Garden Arena’s floor-level media room.

“We would want something near the arena, whether it’s Mandalay Bay or New York-New York or Monte Carlo. Aria, because of its partnership (with investors from Dubai), is not as easy to work with as those that MGM (resorts) fully owns. But T-Mobile is a great building, and we’re looking forward to going there. We just need to figure out the hotels.”

MGM Grand Garden Arena, not so incidentally, is to undergo a renovation sometime in 2017, with the addition of new luxury boxes, similar to the 44 luxury boxes ringing T-Mobile. That will further cut capacity for general ticket-buyers for events at the Grand Garden (but will be a pretty suite option for the venue’s corporate partners), making a move to T-Mobile and its 20,000 capacity a classic no-brainer.

“It’s less than 11,000 compared to about 20,000,” Romeo said. “Even I can do that math.”

Romeo also hopes to use the new Monte Carlo Theater, set to open in 2017, as a home for the ACM All-Star Jam, the concert that follows the ACM Awards at MGM Grand on Sunday. And he hopes to use the three stages at Toshiba Plaza at T-Mobile for further live performances.

“This is what we’ve talked about — the arena, the new theater and the courtyard,” Romeo said. “Then you add the Festival Grounds, and you have a lot of activity for fans everywhere.”

Know, too, that featured in these grand designs is an expected full renovation and renaming of Monte Carlo to compete with the uber-hipness of such newer resorts as the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. This forward thinking falls in line with the ACM’s plan to remain in Las Vegas for the foreseeable future, as the show is contractually bound with Dick Clark Productions and CBS through 2021, and Romeo has no plans to leave.

“If we were to entertain that idea, it would be for some special opportunity, like a new building opening up that we could use one time for the show,” he said. “But even then, we would come back. We’re committed that Las Vegas is our home for the next 10 years.”

The future of the ACM Awards actually arrives today with the Party for a Cause on the 50-acre Festival Grounds parcel. Tonight’s headliner is Underwood, who is set to take the stage at 10:25. The three-day event is loaded with food and retail vendors, and the staging is so ambitious that Romeo and his team chose the Festival Grounds over the closer — but smaller — Las Vegas Village across from Luxor and Mandalay Bay.

The difference is the Festival Grounds is about 35 acres larger than the Village, and the Party for a Cause needs that space.

“In case you look at me like I’m an idiot and say, ‘Didn’t you know the Village was right there?’ We know the Village pretty much caps at 20,000 capacity, and if we put all of our activation in there with all of our vendors — we have 28 food vendors — we would probably cut half the capacity down,” Romeo said. “I’d like to be saying four years from now that we will have 40,000, 50,000 people enjoying not just a music festival, but a full country lifestyle event.”

Moving to that site after the most recent Strip-side Party for a Cause was held at the Linq Promenade parking lot in 2014 is an expensive proposition. “It’s a $5 million roll of the dice, a $5 million gamble,” Romeo said.

Romeo envisions an ACM Awards citywide experience similar to how the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo has spread across the city.

“Look at Cowboy Christmas (the giant retail center at Las Vegas Convention Center) that is up during the NFR,” Romeo said. “You might come here to watch one night of the NFR, or maybe not watch any of it live, but go to things like Cowboy Christmas to shop. You get a full experience in Las Vegas.”

Expect some adjustment in the format of Party for a Cause. Unwittingly, the ACM Awards telecast is competing with its own charity festival by holding the third night of the festival alongside the live awards at MGM Grand.

“This has caused us to rethink Party for a Cause in terms of Sunday and is that going to be the best day when against our own awards show?” Romeo said, as if thinking aloud. “Every act we booked on Sunday for Party for a Cause, unbeknownst to me, is booked on the awards show. So we have to say, Kenny (Chesney), you’re going to do the third number in the awards show and then we’re going to get you to the Festival Grounds.’ ”

One idea is to shift Party for a Cause to a Thursday-Saturday schedule, or turn Sunday into a different sort of festival.

“We could turn Sunday into a big viewing party out there, put the show live on the big screen,” Romeo said. “You can’t handle 40,000 to watch it live, but you can at that party, and we could have a couple of the big winners go down there and do a couple of numbers.”

Romeo thinks it through and nods. “This could become a cool thing.”

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow Kats on Instagram at Instagram.com/JohnnyKats1.

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