Luaus amid the towers

By Jerry Fink

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Guests wear leis, sip mai tais and pina coladas and dine on roast pork and other South Seas delicacies as they watch the troupe of entertainers re-create a Polynesian feast on a tropical island.

Think warm ocean breezes, palm trees, starry nights, grass skirts, ukuleles and steel guitars.

For a couple of hours about 500 people escape reality and forget they are sitting poolside at long banquet tables on the roof at the Imperial Palace, surrounded by hotel towers.

They are carried away by the feast and the music and dances — fire knife and war dances, and hulas of several South Pacific cultures.

The dancing is fast and furious and it energizes the tourists from Iowa, Nebraska and beyond, many of whom have made the Imperial Luau a regular stop on their Las Vegas itinerary since it debuted there in 1991.

For those 17 years, the Drums of the Islands dance company — with its cast of beautiful women dancers and tattooed men — has been an entertainment staple at the Imperial Palace.

The luaus are held twice a week during the warmer months — at 7 p.m. Tuesdays and Saturdays from May 3 to Sept. 30 this year.

Drums of the Islands is owned and produced by Rozita V. Lee, who also is host of the show and sometimes dances. The company has been around long enough that the cast includes three generations of performers — Lee; her daughter, Roxanna Ayakawa, a dancer and costume designer; and Ayakawa’s 20-year-old daughter, Charisse “Nani” Ayakawa, who began dancing with the show when she was 4. The troupe also includes Lee’s grandson Kaleolani Yuzon, who joined in 2006.

Several of the cast have been with the company since it formed, including Roxanna Ayakawa, Peniamina Lave, lead male dancer; Foi Tuitama, who portrays the Maori chief and a Samoan fire knife dancer; and Sal Tuipelehake, a dancer and the Fijian chief. Val Viray, dancer and secondary fire knife dancer, joined in 1996. Tiffany Dixon, lead female dancer and choreographer, and dancers Angela Batula and Kim Smith joined in 2004.

“The boys in the cast have been pretty stable, but the girls change some,” says Lee, a native of Hawaii. “They get married and pregnant or move away or get too big.”

Lee got into the dance company business by default.

She was special assistant to then-Gov. Bob Miller, managing his Las Vegas office, representing him at functions and starting his Asian Pacific American Council.

She was approached by a long-running Hawaiian company, Germaine’s Luau, which wanted to open a branch in Las Vegas. A trained dancer and a spokeswoman for Hawaii, Lee thought she could combine those passions. She resigned from Miller’s staff and began booking Germaine’s Luau.

Then, Germaine’s decided to concentrate on its business in Oahu.

“But the dancers had moved here and they didn’t want to go back,” Lee says. “Germaine’s said they couldn’t support them here, so the only thing for me to do was to buy the company.”

She and her husband, physician Clifford C.H. Lee, bought the group. The new company started at the Lady Luck and performed there for many years, as well as at the Imperial Palace and other venues.

“At first the luau at the Palace was for high rollers,” Lee says. “They all loved it, but I asked the catering manager if we could do it on a regular basis for the hotel guests.”

David Kolaski, marketing executive with the Imperial Palace, says the luau remains popular even after 17 years, often selling out.

“It’s something different that people can’t find anywhere else,” he says. “You can go to a million comedy shows and other types of shows, but there are not many dinner shows left, and certainly not a luau.”

The weather isn’t always cooperative.

One recent evening the luau took place in 50 mph winds that had guests grabbing napkins and plates and trying to keep drinks from blowing over. Rain has forced the luau inside, if one of the banquet rooms is available.

“That’s not as much fun,” Lee says. “We can’t do the fire knife dance in the ballroom.”

There have been times when the event was canceled altogether, but that is rare.

The production focuses on Polynesian cultural dances, covering Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa and New Zealand.

“It’s a great legacy and we really enjoy doing it,” Lee says. “But all of the cast members have day jobs. They wish they could do it all the time, but there’s not a venue or hotel that would do it on a regular basis.”

In the off-season, when they aren’t at the Imperial Palace, the troupe performs across the country.

“We travel to North Dakota every year in the winter to perform at an Indian casino there,” she says. “Once we were caught in a blizzard at the Indianapolis airport.”

That must have made those grass skirts a little uncomfortable.