Courtesy
Dita Von Teese
Monday, July 10, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Last week’s announcement from Live Nation and Caesars Entertainment touting a new burlesque residency show from Dita Von Teese at the iconic Jubilee Theater at Horseshoe Las Vegas may have caught many by surprise.
But the 50-year-old performer known as the queen of modern burlesque says a Vegas residency show is something she’s been working toward for a long time. “It took quite a while, many years to actually get to someone with the power to make it happen the right way,” she said. “We’ve seen burlesque shows before and it’s usually in a little room with about a hundred people. It takes someone coming out to see my show and what I actually do on my tours to understand where I should be.”
“Dita Las Vegas: A Jubilant Revue” is set to open on the Strip on October 5 and presale tickets are already available via Ticketmaster. The show is scheduled to perform on select Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings at 9 p.m. with special performances planned for New Year’s Eve weekend.
Hyped as “the most lavishly staged burlesque production ever, anywhere,” the 75-minute show is an elevation of Von Teese’s touring productions and will make use of the full capabilities of the 1,160-seat Jubilee Theater and some of the legendary costumes created by Bob Mackie and Pete Menefee that haven’t been seen on this stage or anywhere else since the venue’s namesake spectacular closed in 2016.
“I’ve seen ‘Jubilee’ more times than I can count,” Von Teese said. “Every time I’d go Vegas, I had two stops, the ‘Jubilee’ show and the Liberace Museum. Those things are gone now, for the most part, but it was very exciting when the room was offered because it is that historic, and my first question was, where are all the feathers?”
Obviously, lavish costumes like the ones that adorned Las Vegas showgirls in “Jubilee” and similar productions of bygone eras are a major part of her touring revues. Von Teese’s performances and style have transcended burlesque and impacted fashion and pop culture. Jean-Paul Gaultier, Elie Saab and Alexis Mabille are among the designers who have created costumes for her performances, and her feet are perpetually draped in Christian Louboutin.
Von Teese wants audiences to understand that this residency will take inspiration from “Jubilee” and that vintage Vegas history, but she’s not re-creating anything.
“It’s a little bit daunting to build a show for that stage. It’s a tough act to follow. I respect ‘Jubilee’ so much and everyone who was in it and working on it,” she said. “My mission for the last 25 years has been to evolve burlesque into something different, and at no point have I tried to re-create the past or do it how it was done back then.
“I’m interested in technology, in feminine power, and that’s very different from old-timey burlesque entertainment that was run by men for men. Burlesque in this day and age means something totally different for so many people.”
She expects her residency, which will have a larger cast than her touring shows and feature mostly local performers, to distinguish itself from the many popular female revues running in smaller cabaret-style rooms along the Strip. “People who have seen my show, and I’ve done it for millions of people all over the world, know that it’s very different,” she said.
Among her collaborators are director and executive producer Michael Schwandt, who has worked with myriad superstar recording artists for stage shows as well as with Cirque du Soleil for the short-lived action production “R.U.N,” and Von Teese’s longtime designer partners Mr. Pearl and Catherine D’Lish.
“Right now it’s full-force … I’m finalizing casting, deciding which props we have that can be used in a new way, which things we want to make bigger. I feel very excited because I’ve never had a team like this; usually it’s just me and a few others,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve had people helping me in a bigger way, because it’s usually me at the house with a team of friends and a lot of glitter and rhinestones.”
