Golden blip

Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 | midnight

Producer Myron Martin thinks it was a New York Times reporter he told expectantly that Vegas was quickly going to be Broadway West. “I guess I was really wrong,” he says now. “At the time this seemed like the perfect place for great entertainment of all kinds. I don’t think anyone really knows what happened.”

Back in January 2006, Martin was a co-producer of Hairspray, slated to open at Luxor the following month. Also on the horizon at that point were Phantom of the Opera (Venetian), The Producers (Paris) and Spamalot (Wynn), and in the distant future Jersey Boys was planned for the yet-to-be-built Palazzo.

The optimism regarding the future of Vegas entertainment was not contained to Broadway shows. A few months earlier Prince had taken up residency at the Rio, previously known for hosting dated family variety act The Scintas. And this wasn’t Prince doing a carefully staged hits set. This was Prince at his most freewheeling: bringing an after-hours jam feel to a Vegas show (unlike the Barry Manilow, Céline Dion, Elton John, Bette Midler and Cher shows), where he would go onstage whenever he wanted to get started and play for as long as he wanted, and you were more likely to hear an elongated Sly and the Family Stone jam than “Little Red Corvette.”

By this point John Stagliano’s S&M-tinged Fashionistas at Krave was drawing national plaudits by raising the bar on the most predictable form of Vegas entertainment: the topless show. As a director, Stagliano gave the audience exactly what he wanted to create, with no pandering: essentially more than an hour of contemporary dance and artistic aspiration mixed into a narrative told through hard industrial-metal music, unique costuming (probably the first use of a ball gag on a Vegas stage) and among the most challenging choreography to ever be part of a Vegas production show.

It seemed to more people than Martin that Vegas entertainment was heading toward a new sophistication. Back then I was one of those people predicting that the curse of fat Elvis had been lifted. By that I meant that Vegas was now a town where, as with shopping and dining, a new discernment (and audience) for quality entertainment had arrived.

But producers quickly gleaned that compromises would be needed to bring a more demanding level of entertainment to Vegas audiences. Fashionistas was never profitable. And Avenue Q, attempting to preserve the integrity of the original Broadway show, complete with intermission, opened and closed quickly at Wynn.

But rather than be seen as a threat to the basic model of Broadway Vegas, the failure of Avenue Q was blamed on the show lacking stars, and asking Vegas audiences to watch the full Broadway version. So Hairspray opened with the original Broadway stars. The Producers opened with David Hasselhoff. Both were shorter than on Broadway and intermission-free. Phantom went so far, to creator Andrew Lloyd Webber’s consternation, as to rename itself Phantom—The Las Vegas Spectacular. The new version, unlike its Broadway counterpart, was both shorter and lacking an intermission.

But for most of these shows, nothing helped. Within a few months, Hairspray closed. The Producers painfully lasted out its one-year contract before closing. Spamalot also closed after a year. Phantom seems to be doing solid business. Phantom—The Las Vegas Spectacular can only be seen at the Venetian, and that is a marketing advantage nobody is ready to cede. By the summer of 2006 Prince had moved on as well. Thanks to financing from Stagliano’s personal fortune, Fashionistas didn’t close until 2008. But by the time Jersey Boys opened at the Palazzo earlier this year, there was not a single Broadway-style show announced for any of the many new venues being prepared for the next generation of resorts.

In fact, this Golden Era we all foresaw turned out to be no more than a Golden Blip, like family Vegas or a Vegas with Guggenheims and other art galleries—a reinvention that did not work.

If anything, as the recent closings of Second City and Toxic Audio have underlined, these are not the days for Vegas entertainment to attempt any sort of edgy or ambitious form of amusement. And wouldn’t you know it, the sure things are coming like clockwork, so there is little to look forward to. Toxic Audio has been replaced by a magic show. Donny & Marie are on their way to the Flamingo, and Danny Gans is moving from the Mirage into the theater built for Spamalot.

There is endlessly more Cirque, which has an Elvis Presley-themed show planned for CityCenter, and that’s after they open a show next month at Luxor (which replaces Hairspray) pairing magician Criss Angel and acrobatics. Nothing new going on here.

But Donny & Marie, Angel’s Believe and Danny Gans all pass what one entertainment executive and a critic for a daily newspaper, both not for attribution, call “the five-word rule,” meaning that to be successful in Las Vegas, an act must be summed up in five words. Danny Gans “does impressions,” and thus passes the test with ease, whereas the plot of The Producers, which involves two men planning a complicated swindle involving a show within a show, fails the test as surely as the show closed in Vegas.

But Martin and the others all point to another factor in the demise of ambitious entertainment on the Strip. Says Martin, “Vegas used to mean going to a show. Now people go to dinner and a nightclub. What we had was the highest quality and great variety, but what happened here was really the nightclub scene took off instead.”

Martin and the others all agree that the future of Vegas is big names and safe bets. “The audience decides in the end,” the entertainment executive says about Vegas’ brief walk on the wild side. So in the future, expect the Strip to play it down the middle with the safest, most familiar performers available to be signed. In other words, 2008 is nothing like the Golden Blip of 2006.