Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

REVIEW:

Jubilee!’: Topless and timeless

Vestige of Old Vegas entertainment is gaudy, prismatic, classic and … gay?

Jubilee

Leila Navidi

In a show mostly revolving around spectacular entrances, the curtain closes on performer Brooke Opheim at the end of a scene of “Jubilee!” on Saturday at Bally’s.

Jubilee! 2009

Launch slideshow »

Jubilee! backstage tour

Showgirl Lara Preister shows what full makeup and costume look like to her tour group during a backstage tour of the Launch slideshow »

If You Go

  • What: Donn Arden’s “Jubilee!”
  • When: 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. Saturday-Thursday
  • Where: Jubilee! Theater at Bally’s
  • Admission: $52.50-$112.50; 634-3434, ballyslasvegas.com
  • Running time: 90 minutes
  • Audience advisory: The 7:30 p.m. show on Saturday is covered (not topless)

Sun Coverage

How to convey the contradictory feelings provoked by “Jubilee!,” the wonderfully awful, terribly terrific, 28-year-old Las Vegas showgirl spectacular at Bally’s?

“Jubilee!” is:

• The sort of show I imagined I’d be seeing all the time in Las Vegas, with squadrons of showgirls carefully descending mirrored staircases while balancing colossal feathered headdresses. Sadly, it’s the last of its kind.

• One of the inspirations for Bette Midler’s “The Showgirl Must Go On” across the street at Caesars Palace. At half the price for a decent seat, “Jubilee!” makes Midler’s showgirl homage look drab and tasteful in comparison.

• Also the apparent inspiration for “Showgirls,” universally acclaimed as one of the worst-best movies ever made. But the gaudy, grandiose production numbers in “Jubilee!” are thrillingly, appallingly, hilariously, endearingly real. I thought my colleague was kidding when he told me the sinking of the “Titanic” is reenacted onstage.

• A total time warp: Think “The Lawrence Welk Show” (or “The Love Boat”) with breasts. The closest it comes to the past millennium is mid-70s discorobics. Clean-cut fellas and begowned gals croon (and more often than not pantomime) show tunes and standards to loud but innocuously orchestrated prerecorded tracks. For best results, try to erase a half-century’s worth of irony and cynicism from your consciousness. Just have fun.

• Ostensibly a “topless” revue, and it does in fact deliver dozens of (eerily identical) bare breasts. But the effect — multiple blank-eyed, grinning Stepford-clone mannequins — is oddly heatless and anesthetic.

• Not just populated by showgirls, by the way. They don’t show them in the TV ads and billboards, but there are also often about two-dozen nearly nekkid guys dominating the stage.

• The single gayest show I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a dozen Pride parades in San Francisco. Eyebrows plucked to a near nonexistence, the aforementioned chorus boys do back bends in studded leather jockstraps in more than one set piece. And I swear a couple of the guys doubled as gals in the Titanic segment. Sporting Furby-scale eyelashes and Bozo lipliner, some of the showgirls are less convincing as females than Frank Marino’s “La Cage” posse.

• Home to a handful of entertaining specialty acts, most notably a pair of metallicized male gymnasts, bald, silvery supermen who perform feats of Vegas-ized yoga (including an astonishing slo-mo forward fall) and look like twin Bond villains or Oscar statues in a fight to the death.

• A living shrine to costume designer Bob Mackie, famous for Cher’s most outre get-ups. Mackie’s Erte-inspired fantasias, sequined carwash skirts and serpentine minidresses actually outdo Cher’s wardrobe and might inspire envious insecurity in Bjork.

•The stage for a topless wedding scene in which the gravity-defying bride sports a sci-fi orbital corona, while the fully clad groom croons “I Married an Angel.”

• A gaudy homage to the “more everything!” styles of such great stage and screen directors as Flo Ziegfield, Busby Berkeley and Irwin Allen. The late producer/choreographer Donn Arden gave himself above-the-title billing, and gave showgirls every sort of Big Entrance you can imagine: Frequently multiplied by mirrors, they descend on swings, pop from peek-a-boo balconies, and shimmer and shimmy down heavenly stairways. “Jubilee!” is pretty much all entrances, come to think of it.

• Jaw-droppingly random and rampantly campy, zigging from Rockettes-style kicklines to patriotic, Branson-ready tap dancers, and zagging to the Samson and Delilah story, reenacted in Cecil B. DeMille Biblical epic style — climaxing with a hunky Samson tearing down a temple, finally crushed under a gigantic demon head with blazing red eyes.

• Putting Spinal Tap to shame.

• The last stand of a glorious Old Vegas style of showbiz, now that “Folies Bergere” has left the building.

• A small economy in itself: “Jubilee!” employs more than 100 dancers, singers and technicians, including people who keep the feathers fluffed and rhinestones sparkling.

• Apparently not doing so well, business-wise: On Tuesday night ushers were handing out free tickets to the show at the bottom of the Bally’s escalators.

• Utter escapism and a timeless civic treasure.

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