A New Yorker-turned-Nevadan ponders Broadway in Vegas

Steve Bornfeld

Friday, April 13, 2001 | 9:59 a.m.

"Do you, Broadway, take Las Vegas to be your lawfully wedded spouse, to love, honor, cherish and promise to snuggle up alongside pirates, fountains, volcanoes and Siegfried & Roy for as long as you both shall live?

"And do you, Las Vegas, take Broadway to be your lawfully wedded spouse, to love, honor, cherish and promise to muffle that exasperating WHEEL-OF-FORTUNE! slot machine during the quieter moments of the overture for as long as you both shall live?"

How about this? Let's ditch the vows and settle for a nice hot fling.

You see, this marriage talk resurfaces every time a Broadway-style show hits in Vegas ("Chicago"), flops in Vegas ("Notre Dame de Paris") or visits Vegas (the trifecta of "Fame," "Fosse" and "Les Miserables," in limited runs starting with "Fame" Wednesday at the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts).

Can Broadway thrive in Vegas?

For this New Yorker-turned-Nevadan, the answer is threefold:

Broadway shows have a place in Las Vegas. The culture of Broadway has no place in Las Vegas. And something is better than nothing.

Explanations will follow. But first, a little flashback action.

To this kid, Broadway was mythic. (So were the Yankees and Barbara Eden in her genie outfit, but those are other essays.)

TV was in my living room: highly entertaining, but you can only get so moved by something you can watch in your jammies. Movies dazzled, but at a safe, surreal distance: larger than life, but never lifelike.

But Broadway theater, well, that was art made human.

The excitement that crackles in a Broadway theater just before the curtain rises, the intake of breath as the orchestra in the pit snaps to horns-up mode, the thought that this live burst of story and song and laughter and tragedy and triumph is just for you, just on this day, never to be repeated quite the same way for anyone else on any other day, well, that is electric.

Broadway was always a treat. Twice it was transforming.

As a Jewish kid, I related to my culture via modest religious rituals and stories passed down by relatives about my Eastern European ancestors. Colorful and informative, they were also oddly remote -- until "Fiddler." That matinee, so vivid in its re-creation of Russian cruelty vs. Jewish spirit -- driven by searing performances and joyous music -- flipped the switch. I'd always understood my heritage. On that day I felt my heritage.

As a teenager, I idolized this actor. He was Movies Personified. But onstage he was Passion Personified. As dying bon vivant Scottie Templeton, whose illness forces him out from behind his goodtime-Charley defenses to confront true pain and raw emotions, there, mere feet from me, was my idol. Lemmon: In the flesh. In the moment. In my face. Acting, just for me. On Broadway it always felt like it was just for me.

Over the decades the addiction intensified: "Sweeney Todd," "Guys and Dolls," "That Championship Season," "The Hot L Baltimore," "Sleuth," "Ain't Misbehavin," "God's Favorite," "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "1776," "Les Miserables" -- and a hopeless attachment to that New York tone poem, "West Side Story."

Back then Vegas was a faraway fantasyland to this lifelong East Coaster, no less mystical in its own ring-a-ding, Rat Packer way. If Broadway was real life made dreamlike, Vegas was dreamland made real. Its pleasure-principle allure was part of what lured me here nearly four years ago -- when I fell hard for the "new Vegas." You've got to love a city that so boldly, unapologetically embraces growth and change. Entertainment-wise, Las Vegas mushroomed from tuxedoed crooners and feathered showgirls to high-concept production shows, magicians, impressionists, impersonators -- and touring Broadway shows:

"Chicago," "Cats," "Footloose," "Smokey Joe's Cafe," "Grease," "Annie," "Rent" and "Cabaret" have topped the Vegas playbill. And here we are, at the other end of the flashback: Broadway shows have a place in Las Vegas. The culture of Broadway has no place in Las Vegas. And something is better than nothing.

Broadway productions are classy, brassy additions to the Vegas scene. Note the fine print: In Vegas, they're additions to the scene. In New York, Broadway is the scene. Or at least its most prominent scene. That fabled thoroughfare of theater marquees is New York's marquee attraction.

Consider Shakespeare's famed "Hamlet" quote: "The play's the thing." But bump into the Bard strolling the Strip and he'll undoubtedly tell you: "The hotel's the thing."

Entertainment and amenities -- shopping, restaurants, casinos, erupting volcanoes, noisy pirate battles, prancing water fountains, female impersonators, Siegfried & Roy, busty show babes, Blue Men and splashy productions, Broadway and otherwise -- serve this city's hotel culture. Each plays dutiful handmaiden to the engine that drives this town.

But New York's theater district creates a culture of Broadway. It's a state of mind -- creative, Bohemian and a little loopy, as artists tend to be -- that transcends the outward glamour. (Ditto, by the way, Los Angeles and London's West End.)

Not to overly romanticize Broadway: It is boffo tourist business in New York. It can overdose on big, bloated musicals with garish carnival appeal that attract out-of-town bucks, leaving spare change to produce the challenging straight drama that makes theater theater and sometimes doesn't make it at all.

And for that it takes its lumps -- applied with all the subtlety of a jackhammer on Eighth Avenue -- from New York's unforgiving theater media. But legitimate theater is a lifestyle in New York. In Las Vegas, it's a grander gambling break. And until a professional theater district or a formidable performing arts center (battle on, Bob Goulet) takes root in Las Vegas, busts Broadway out of the hotels, delivers it to locals and cultivates community loyalty, it will ever be thus. Stripped of all tourists, Broadway still feeds New York, where natives invest pride -- and cash -- in it. Broadway belongs to them -- they only rent it out to the camera-and-fanny pack crowd. That pride took the better part of a century to swell.

Yes, Las Vegas attracts scattered Broadway road tours -- but that makes us a train stop, not a branch of Broadway.

Regional theater in Las Vegas deserves a standing O. Local companies are ambitious, moving beyond the well-trod works of Neil Simon, whose brilliant-but-overdone repertoire is the mother's milk of American repertory theater from Boston to Bumbleville. Challenging material from out-of-the-mainstream playwrights have dotted Las Vegas stages over the past few years, as well as hometown plays by hometown writers. But it's regional theater -- not the big-budget bonanzas on the Strip -- that regularly renew that Maybe-We're-About-To-Become-Broadway-West fever.

And looking Strip-ward, the particulars are curious.

No attempt at Broadway-style permanence has ever really been permanent. The lengthy run of "Chicago" at Mandalay Bay and the ill-fated but well-intentioned "Notre Dame de Paris" at Paris Las Vegas were promising signs, but both departed. The other best hope for a Broadway anchor was the proposed "Miss Spectacular" by legendary composer Jerry Herman. Steve Wynn announced plans to plant the show at the Mirage. Wynn subsequently sold the hotel and "Miss Spectacular" is missing in action. Then there's the upcoming trio of "Fame," "Fosse" and "Les Miserables," stationed at the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts. While Aladdin management deserves kudos for the ambitious bookings, even for fleeting runs, the shows' cavernous, rock arena-sized setting is unsettling.

Broadway theaters -- even those housing its most expansive musicals -- are relatively cozy, intimate venues, sealing a bond between performers and audiences. An acquaintance of mine (an ex-New Yorker and Broadway-phile) recently took in the musical revue "Forever Swing" at the Aladdin. While smitten with the score, she felt so adrift and cut off from the action that she swore not to return for the Broadway blowouts.

Another knock on Vegas as a Broadway clone is that its merry-go-round vibe and get-me-back-to-the-gaming mentality -- which determine how house entertainment is chosen -- are anathema to the length (usually two hours-plus, with an intermission) and emotional depth of most Broadway productions.

Intermissions are poison, either wrecking gamblers' flows at the tables because they have to take their theater seats a second time (an irritant to the casino) or costing the show craps-minded theatergoers who split after the first half of the performance (an irritant to the producers and performers).

Accordingly, Vegas shows aim for visual grandstanding and sensory stimulation: feeling rather than thinking; watching rather than listening. It's the theater-as-experience vs. theater-as-diversion dilemma that is circumvented by either slashing a show's length or choosing stripped-down material for permanent productions. The intermission-less "Chicago," while a witty and entertaining piece of razzle-dazzle, was spare and sleek and perpetually in motion -- dance dominated plot, not vice versa -- never building to the emotional gravitas that could hijack a gambler's attention. The revue "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," indefinitely ensconced at the Flamingo Las Vegas, is a featherweight confection that slides down as fast and easy as "Jubilee!" and "Folies Bergere."

The noble and hard-to-figure failure was "Notre Dame de Paris," the French import that made its U.S. debut in Las Vegas instead of on Broadway. Was it indeed that the Vegas entertainment ethos could not support the Broadway-style complexities of the piece -- or was it simply lousy theater that would have dive-bombed just as emphatically in New York, London or Podunk?

And it seems obvious that straight dramatic plays -- so vital to the health of Broadway as an artistic and creative entity -- would be a casino's doomsday scenario.

The glory of the Las Vegas Strip is its prism principle, the way it takes tantalizing slices of exotic dreamscapes -- Paris, Arabia, ancient Rome, Venice, Egypt -- and refracts them back at us like a carnival pinwheel. Vegas thrives on half-scale approximation, not full-scale duplication. Just like the scaled-down Gotham of New York-New York, Broadway lives here in miniature, a recurring appetizer on the Strip smorgasbord, never the banquet.

And if, therefore, the shows of Broadway can't evolve into the culture of Broadway in Las Vegas, well, something is better than nothing.

But at least in their own ways, Las Vegas and Broadway both embrace a soul-nourishing spectacle.

As actress Julie Harris once put it: "God comes to us in theater."