They’re the newest stars of the Las Vegas Strip, but odds are you wouldn’t recognize even one of them if you bumped into them in a casino or in a buffet line.
While Jay Leno was bombing at the White House Correspondents Dinner in D.C., and Shane Mosley going down to Floyd Mayweather at the MGM Grand, Conan O'Brien emerged undefeated in his two-night gig at the Pearl at the Palms.
"A Choreographer's Showcase" is an unfairly boring title for the annual collaboration between Cirque du Soleil performers and Nevada Ballet Theatre dancers, staged last Sunday at the Mystere Theatre at Treasure Island.
"Viva Elvis," which officially opened at CityCenter’s Aria Friday night after weeks of paid previews and adjustments, joins six other Strip-resident shows, and it’s likely to be lucky number seven for Cirque du Soleil.
An interactive, energetic 80-minute massacre of corporate cliches and self-help stupidity, "Donny Clay" is staged in the Chi Showroom on the second level of the casino, the stage otherwise occupied by the upmarket nudi-tease that is "Peepshow." It's ironic and a bit genius that this spoofery of success-industry swindling is staged just a few hundred feet from the business suites and conference rooms where this kind of nonsense takes place in awful earnest.
As Bette Midler folded up her feathered fans - after singing the first verse of "Wind Beneath My Wings" to her orchestra, the next to "4,500 of my closest friends" - it felt like something more than a Vegas show was ending.
Lady Gaga out-Cher-ed Cher, made Cirque du Soleil and Britney's "Circus" tour look like county fair carnivals, and made New Year's Eve in Las Vegas anticlimactic. The first of the pop phenomenon's two sold-out shows at The Pearl concert venue at the Palms rendered all previous showbiz obsolete. Let's hope one of our Strip moguls has the sense and foresight to try to convince Gaga to keep her "Monster Ball" tour right here in Las Vegas - and make the rest of the world come to her.
The triumphant arrival of Garth Brooks may be the first glimpse of the next Las Vegas and a new showbiz paradigm: the anti-spectacle. After a decade of ever-more-elaborate (and impersonal) Cirque-dominated, can-you-top-this? extravaganzas -- epitomized by Celine Dion and then Bette Midler -- Brooks and Steve Wynn are keeping it simple.
Just before the clock struck 8 on a chilly Friday night, I slipped crankily into my seat, bracing myself to see “A Christmas Carol” on stage for what seemed like the bazillionth time.
Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra has become a familiar staple for orchestras since it premiered in Boston in 1944, but it received its first Las Vegas airing 65 years later, at UNLV’s Artemus Ham Hall on Saturday night.
