Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Entertainment:

It’s looking a lot like Old Vegas

Economic plunge has resorts looking to less pricey, more everyman-friendly amusements

Freaks

The audience reacts during the adult production Launch slideshow »

After years of pushing the pricey and posh and salivating over the luxe and exclusive, Las Vegas appears to be testing a return to its honky-tonk badonkadonk roots as America’s Boardwalk.

A carny-style sideshow called “Freaks” has suddenly sprouted on the Strip at O’Sheas.

A rattletrap heavy metal revue called “Monster Circus” recently stomped into the ordinarily sedate Hilton, home away from home for Barry Manilow.

And next week, the teasingly titled “Peepshow” will pop up at Planet Hollywood.

Is this triad of attention-getting entertainment apparitions just a coincidental blip, or do they herald a move away from high-priced headliners and a return to this town’s everyman appetites?

More likely this is an indicator of a savvy and necessary economic reaction in the entertainment sector, a sign that Vegas is on the verge of seriously scaling down, de-emphasizing the deluxe and courting the coarser tastes of a more down-market demographic.

Vegas began as America’s affordable getaway, and aside from the gambling, the whole point of the place was that the food, drink and entertainment were cheap or comped.

But the past decade of high-rise investments, and their accompanying egomaniacal expectations and affectations, brought with it a calculated change of perception. Moguls and marketing campaigns strained to create a top-of-mind image of Vegas as an apex of high-end glam and luxury, a red-carpeted, velvet-roped haven for reality stars and impossibly wealthy foreign nationals.

That image makeover may have been too successful. Suddenly we’re gazing down into an economic Grand Canyon, and it seems many of the down-market mainstays of our tourist economy may be thinking our town has gotten just too fancy, too snooty, for its own good. And certainly too expensive.

On Tuesday the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority announced that the number of visitors to Las Vegas declined 8 percent in February compared with a year ago. Air passenger traffic is down about 15 percent. And more of the people who are choosing to come here are driving.

So watch for a renewed emphasis on the scandalous and salacious, as Vegas reverses course and tries to regain its appeal to our basic tastes for the sweet and salty, the shocking and sensational, the cheap and the free.

The Strip wouldn’t really have to change that much to bring back that boardwalk feeling. All the staples are in place:

Vegas offers the supreme “breakin’-the-law” thrill of walking on the street with an open beer or gigantic cocktail.

Like a 24/7 year-round state fair, our menus offer fried everything. And huge portions! One casino is currently boasting of its six-pound, “child size” burrito.

Wax museum? Check. Go-carts, roller coasters, flair bartenders? Check, check, check.

Most visitors are dressed for the boardwalk, happily, if not defiantly sporting flip-flops and rude T-shirts in even the toniest joints.

Everyone hopes this downturn turns up, of course, but maybe this financial lurch has a lesson for Las Vegas. Something about remembering where you came from, and not neglecting or marginalizing the folks that made you what you are.

Of course some still don’t get it: On Monday, the new Joint concert venue at the Hard Rock Hotel trumpeted an occasional concert residency by Carlos Santana, with a top ticket price of $299.

It will be interesting to see how that flies.

In the meantime, whatever you may think of the not-for-the-squeamish substance of a show like “Freaks,” it sure seems like a smart sign of the times, a low-overhead, self-promoting enterprise, free of pretension and full of peculiar talent.

You won’t soon forget it. And it’s priced exactly right.

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