Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Prolific producer David Saxe on reopening his Vegas shows

David Saxe

Christopher DeVargas

David Saxe

Sun on the Strip

David Saxe

Brock speaks with show producer and theater operator David Saxe.

No one was running more shows on the Strip, day after day and week after week, than David Saxe. The Las Vegas native is the producer of long-running shows like “V – The Ultimate Variety Show” and “Vegas! The Show,” and the owner and operator of the Saxe Theater and V Theater venues at the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood, where many more popular shows like “Zombie Burlesque,” “All Shook Up,” “BeatleShow” and Motown revue “Hitzville” were running like clockwork when the pandemic halted all live entertainment.

“My goal in life wasn’t to become a landlord, so to speak, and have a ton of different shows and third-party producers,” Saxe says on the latest episode of the Sun on the Strip podcast. He grew up in the business surrounded by his bandleader father and showgirl-dancer mother, and started to break through as a producer with his sister’s show, “Melinda: The First Lady of Magic.”

He had launched “V” at the Venetian when that theater was handed over to the Blue Man Group, and his search for a new venue landed his show at the mall, then known as the Dessert Passage at the Aladdin.

“Everybody I knew in the business called me and told me I was nuts, but I said I didn’t care where it was. The show is too good and I know how to market and I’m going to bring [the audience] here,” Saxe says. “But it was still a struggle so I knew I had to put more shows in to help pay the rent. That’s when I started bringing in third-party shows that I believed in.”

When Saxe took over a nearby space vacated by magician Steve Wyrick’s show and rechristened it as Saxe Theater, he created “Vegas! The Show” to serve as that venue’s anchor and built a network of varied Vegas entertainment that allowed shows to cross-promote one another and eventually drove high traffic to the Miracle Mile and the resort.

Planet Hollywood is set to reopen this week for the first time since mid-March while the shops have been operating since June. But the theaters and their shows remain closed due to coronavirus restrictions. Saxe is currently sorting through the recently adjusted rules and protocols to operate live entertainment events, trying to find a way to reopen as soon as possible.

“There are a lot of things [the state government] put on us and I’m trying to make sure we can deliver all of that the right way. We’re trying to get clarification on exactly what we have to do and how we have to do it, and then [the next] phase is, is this even commercially viable? Can we make enough money to pay the insurance bills? At this moment, no. It’s not enough.”

In addition to 50% capacity limitations for showrooms and theaters, Saxe may have to contend with a 25-foot setback between stage and audience. That restriction appears to be designed for larger concert venues and is one of the main sticking points where Saxe and other show producers are seeking clarification.

“At the V Theater, we call it that but it’s actually three rooms, and in V2 where he have ‘The Mentalist’ and ‘All Shook Up,’ I can’t even open that room at all. It’s only 25 feet deep in the whole room,” he says. “Even if we can open up and all the [protocols] are met with no code violations, the distancing measures will [bring down] capacities. I’ve got this whole model built on how to populate the rooms based on averages of seating stats and size of parties, and I keep trying to do it over and over. I can’t get it over 15%.”

Despite the enormous challenges of reopening shows like his, Saxe says there’s no way to go but forward. He’s spent the shutdown months writing new shows, revising existing productions and coming up with new policies and procedures for every aspect of his company.

“It’s extremely challenging on so many levels but I think just like most people in entertainment, we can’t not try to get a show open or put a show together. It’s just in our blood,” he says. “We have to keep going and the show must go on. It’s nothing we’re patting ourselves on the back about, saying we have a great attitude about all this. We just can’t shake it. That’s just who we are. We just want to put a show on and we can’t wait, even if there’s no audience.”

Listen to this and more on the Sun on the Strip, also available at Apple Podcasts.