Courtesy Ivory Star Productions
A scene from the new “Bridesmaids” comedy musical at the Orleans.
Monday, Aug. 15, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Just a few miles west of the Strip on busy Tropicana Avenue, the Orleans Hotel and Casino has long offered a multitude of entertainment options at its showroom, lounge-style venues and the adjacent 9,500-capacity Orleans Arena. Only since December has the Boyd Gaming property dipped into a different but familiar kind of Vegas entertainment.
After partnering with local company Ivory Star Productions, the Orleans converted a multipurpose space into The Venue, now functioning as two distinct, intimate entertainment spaces hosting — as of this week — four different production shows.
“We had been focused on what we can do in the showroom and within the arena, and a lot of those things can get quite costly. Our venues are just too big to have a long-standing show,” said Laura Delacruz, regional vice president of marketing for Boyd. “We started talking with Ivory Star about doing some things … and [they] had a lot of creativity and vision for this space on the west end of the casino that we’d been using for a lot of different things.”
"Marriage Can Be Murder" at the Orleans.
Now The Venue is being used for the long-running “Marriage Can Be Murder” comedy-mystery dinner show and the magical “Adam London Laughternoon,” both transplanted from a small showroom at The D Casino and Hotel downtown that shuttered in 2019. There’s also “Friends! The Unauthorized Musical Parody,” based on the popular NBC sitcom, also forced to find a new home when its former space at Paris Las Vegas was closed.
The latest addition is “Bridesmaids: The Unauthorized Movie Musical Parody,” based on the 2011 film of the same name that starred “Saturday Night Live” favorites Kristin Wiig and Maya Rudolph. The new show is co-produced by Ivory Star and Lynn Shore Entertainment, a female-driven musical comedy following a group of girlfriends fighting and laughing their way through one friend’s wedding journey. It promises to be “raunchy yet heartwarming,” just like the movie.
It opens preview performances this week on August 19 with an official world premiere set for September 21. Ticket information is available at bridesmaidshit.com or orleanscasino.com.
Ivory Star CEO John Bentham said he’d been looking at various spaces for placement of his company’s established productions when he found “they synergy between the Boyd group and the Orleans and our company just clicked. They have amazing executives over there who really believe not only in these kinds of shows, but in re-engaging with all the local people we employ.”
The Venue is about 10,000 square feet overall. Its smaller, comedy club-style portion houses “Friends” and “Laughternoon” and seats 70 to 100 people, while the cabaret-style space for “Marriage” and “Bridesmaids” seats 175 to 200 (and is attached to a kitchen, giving producers great flexibility with the food service during “Marriage”).
Casino shows of this size all across the Vegas Valley have seen cutbacks prior to and during the pandemic, as big Strip headlining shows and larger-scale productions have returned to form with more success.
“We were open to anything. We had some great interest from Strip properties but they didn’t work out,” Bentham said. “The timing was perfect here because there was nothing in that space. We had to do some [construction] and some things took longer than we expected, but within a few months it all came together and we were able to open ‘Marriage Can Be Murder’ first in December 2021 in time for some holiday shows.”
Delacruz said the new entertainment offerings have become a nice complement to the headliners in the Orleans Showroom — where concerts from Air Supply, Little River Band and The Commodores are scheduled for the fall — and likely attracted a different audience than the casino’s regulars.
“People like a good, quality, affordable entertainment option, and I think we are pulling some more people from the Strip on a consistent basis in a way we were not able to do before with our one-night headline shows,” she said. “This is giving us some exposure to people we might not have seen on a routine basis.”
The partnership will expand again in late September when Ivory Star, which also produces the annual Glittering Lights holiday display at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, will launch the Seven Oh Brew Oktoberfest at Orleans Arena. Bentham grew up as a “military brat” in Germany and developed a strong affinity for the local culture, and he said it’s been a dream of his to create an authentic, traditional Oktoberfest event in Las Vegas filled with food, beer, entertainment and more.
“We were going to open in 2019 and it didn’t pan out, then of course it was shuttered by COVID, so we already have a lot of nice elements in place. This year, the timing just seemed right,” he said. “We found what could be the perfect festival grounds and the Orleans Arena team has been incredible to work with.
“My ultimate goal over five years is to create one of the largest and best Oktoberfest events in the U.S., something that becomes a legacy event. Las Vegas is filled with incredible entertainment and festivals and my goal is to create something that outlives us and becomes one of those destination events.”
More information about the event can be found at sevenohbrew.com.
