n the late 1990s, Jerry Herman, the Tony-winning composer of Hello, Dolly and Mame, began work on a Broadway musical he knew would be too big for Broadway. It would not, however, be too colossal for the desert. When the appropriate performance venue is found—and Herman insists the day will come—the aptly titled Miss Spectacular will be a show about Las Vegas, for Las Vegas.
"It really should be done in Vegas," says Herman. "It has lots of big production numbers, and it has the opportunity for fantastic scenery and glamorous costumes. It's melodic, and it's accessible. The best thing I can say is, it would be accessible to Vegas audiences. A lot of people who like the score have asked me to do it as a legitimate show or a touring show, and I've been turning them down. I really did it as a 90-minute Vegas piece, and I'm just going to wait until the right place and the right moment come."
Forget about scantily clad showgirls and Wayne Newton. Where live theatre is concerned, it is very much a new day in Las Vegas, and we're not just talking about the performance piece designed for Céline Dion.
There are also projects that have breached the development phase. Consider the company of actors—many on temporary hiatus from a performance break of Dion's A New Day—who recently gathered on the stage of the Chippendales theatre at the Rio for a 30-minute workshop reading of a new musical featuring the songs of Harold Arlen. In an arena where beefcake parades nightly, David Caldwell (manager of the Chippendales show), and Christopher Allen (producer of Tap Dogs) took their first look at a product they envision will soon have a tryout at a major regional theatre. "It's difficult to predict what the entertainment industry is going to pick up on and what they're going to like," says Caldwell, who expects to have another workshop, potentially for regional theatre producers, after Thanksgiving. "So we haven't set our sights and said, 'This is a Vegas show.' We think this is a Broadway show."
Welcome to Sin City: the next big musical theatre breeding ground? Stranger things could happen, says Myron Martin, co-producer of an incoming February production of the musical Hairspray and one of the forces behind a performing arts center scheduled to break ground in fall 2007.
"With the vast amount of talent that calls Las Vegas home, there are going to be shows that are going to want to tour out of Las Vegas," says Martin. "And, maybe—and this is my dream—I think that Las Vegas could be a place where you could launch or try out Broadway shows as well."
Legitimate theatre producers on both coasts are already referring to Las Vegas as Broadway West, and the appellation no longer seems so ludicrous. Is the rest of the country paying heed to the lavish shows being programmed into those mushrooming casino and resort showrooms? Bet your two-drink minimums, they are.
"I think there's a little bit of fear and jealousy between Broadway and Las Vegas," says Herman. "New York is watching very, very closely."
If and when the day arrives that Miss Spectacular unfolds its wings in the sight of its nativity, that show will take its place along a veritable Times Square-esque microcosm on Las Vegas Boulevard—better known to the 39 million tourists that visit the area each year as the Strip. Attention will likely be considerable, as it is with the opening of every new multimillion-dollar presentation, from a sight-specific offering by Cirque du Soleil—such as currently playing Ka, O, or Zumanity—to the much-anticipated, shorter but technologically enhanced production of The Phantom of the Opera due in 2006 at The Venetian.
Mamma Mia!, the bubble-gum musical set to the songs of ABBA, is in its third year at Mandalay Bay, while Queen's We Will Rock You—a London hit that bypassed Broadway and the road—is nearing its first anniversary at Paris Las Vegas. A 90-minute version of Hairspray, with original Tony-winning stars Harvey Fierstein and Dick Latessa, hits the Luxor in February in the venue previously used by Blue Man Group.
Billionaire hotelier Steve Wynn has snapped up the last two winners of the Best Musical Tony as Vegas exclusives. Avenue Q, the puppet-populated show about slackers in New York, opened in September in a custom-built theatre at the Wynn Las Vegas. Monty Python's Spamalot will move into its own Wynn theatre in late 2006. Under the terms of the agreement, Q's stay at the Wynn means it can't tour anywhere in North America, while a national tour of Spamalot won't come to Western road markets including Arizona, Nevada, and—sorry, Angelenos—California.
It might be difficult to assess who is watching the musical proliferation of Sin City with greater interest: traditional Broadway producers or bookers of road tours who have seen potentially big-draw productions bypass the road in favor of a Vegas engagement.
Vegas certainly possesses enticements that neither New York nor even the spiffiest regional houses can come close to offering: those big specially tailored theatres with all the technical bells and whistles; less-stringent union rules, allowing for up to 10 performances per week; and added preparation time to tinker with a show. Some 18 years after making their mark in New York, original creators Andrew Lloyd Webber and Harold Prince now have the opportunity to retool Phantom with a $35 million budget—in part, courtesy of Clear Channel Entertainment—far surpassing what's been spent on any previous Phantom incarnation.
For Avenue Q, Wynn offered the lure of a new theatre—which at 1,200 seats was larger but not unwieldy—as well as no threat of having to edit the show's racier content or reduce the original running time. The production, which opened Sept. 8, plays at just under two hours with an intermission, and no less a critical juggernaut than The New York Times has gone on record as saying the Wynn production is superior to the Broadway version.
Original director Jason Moore restaged the production, bringing original Q cast members John Tartaglia and performer–puppet creator Rick Lyon along to begin the Vegas run. Apart from "two drunken nights where I lost $100," Moore says he had spent little time in Vegas before the Q remount.
It's not a bad place to work, says Moore, who will direct a musical version of Shrek on Broadway in 2007. "It's easier from a logistical, producing and directing standpoint. The unions are strong, and they support their members, but it's not as stringent as some of the New York limits as to what you're able to do. Also, frankly, the fact that Steve Wynn owns the theatre kind of lets you get anything you need to get done. Of all the tech periods I've had, this has been the most efficient, the most well-oiled machine I've ever been a part of."
Tartaglia had never been to the city before joining the Vegas cast. Once he knew he was Vegas-bound, he found himself arguing down the New York naysayers who scoffed at Q's plans to bypass the road. Arriving in town and being part of a new company, he was having a blast. The dry air, he admits, can be murder on a singing voice, and the late-night performances were another adjustment. Still, he has no complaints about a performance schedule which—thanks to double-casting—has him performing five shows a week instead of the standard eight on Broadway.
"The surreal thing to me is to walk out of the theatre section of the building and be in the casino. That's just mind-blowing to me," says Tartaglia, who is committed to the Vegas run through Dec. 4. "That and getting to drive home every day after the show. Coming here I was very timid. I didn't know if I'd be someone who would love it or hate it. I'm also a person who loves that whole glitz and glamour and spectacle. I keep calling it, like, the adult Disneyworld. So I like the fact that 15 minutes away from my home is all these great entertainment venues and experiences."
To Q producer Kevin McCollum, the arrangement was a no-brainer. The price being offered to take the show on the road was less than what he and his partners felt it was worth, and proposed deals came with potential creative changes that the Q team had no intention of making.
As a sit-down show at a newly opened resort, Q has the time to develop the word-of-mouth business a difficult-to-characterize show—such as itself—requires. The advertising campaign "See what all the fuzz is about" is under way, with the prospect of Wynn hotel guests finding a little piece of the show in their hotel rooms—something fuzzy, perhaps—not far behind.
"I'm not a show that just sold to Wynn," says McCollum, who concluded the deal even before Q was the surprise Best Musical winner at the 2004 Tonys. "I am a show that entered into a partnership with one of the inventors of modern Vegas. We're going to be here doing our 10 shows per week, and people are going to be talking about it. The Wynn has 2,700 rooms, and it's going to expand to over 5,000. You're going to have a captive audience wanting to play with us, and we have the luxury of time."
The deal, however, included an exclusivity agreement, forcing theatregoers interested in seeing the show to go to Las Vegas or Broadway. A tour, had it happened, would likely have ended up at the Mark Taper Forum or the Ahmanson, two of the theatres run by Michael Ritchie, artistic director of Center Theatre Group. Ditto for Spamalot.
"We lost something," admits Ritchie. "I think those two shows fit the Vegas mentality of going to see a show, but not every Broadway musical, by any stretch, is going to be compatible with the Vegas mindset. In the long term, it remains to be seen how viable a theatre town it is and how appropriate it is for shows to go there."
Defining what fits the "Vegas mindset" is, in many ways, an expensive pull of a slot machine handle. Competition for tourist entertainment dollars is ferocious. And even when offered the most proven of musical theatre franchises, will the enterprising casino owner take the chance that a customer who just dropped $2,000 at the craps table is going to be in the mood to shell out another $85 to catch Les Misérables and then return to the tables afterward, happier?
Even the rarely chipper puppets of Avenue Q risk sending their audience back to the gaming tables at intermission should their sung pronouncements, "It Sucks To Be Me" or "I Wish I Could Go Back to College," hit too close to home.
"Puppets having sex and dropping the F-bomb on stage—that's pretty edgy," admits Anthony Curtis, publisher of the web guidebook LasVegasAdvisor.com. "I think Steve Wynn looked at the range of things he could get and decided he wanted something with a little more pizzazz and edginess, and I think he was 100 percent right. A huge sector of the Vegas visiting market is not going to pay $100 to see any show whatsoever. So he quit trying to find something that was universally palatable."
Contortion mixed with spectacle—à la Cirque du Soleil and Blue Man Group—has proven to be a reliable seller, as has a recognizable international hit such as Mamma Mia!, the first of the new wave of musicals to settle into the Strip. But visual razzle-dazzle alone can't guarantee an audience: How does a Starlight Express run for two years, while an effects-laden extravaganza such as EFX Live with Michael Crawford fails to catch on?
Avenue Q may have time to find and cultivate its audience. But its neighboring Wynn production, Franco Dragone's Le Rêve, is a $90 million Cirque-like extravaganza that went back in for revisions following initial negative buzz.
Notre Dame de Paris, a French Canadian version of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame that played the Paris Las Vegas in 2000, was too dark. Chicago, which featured rotating celebrity Roxie Harts and Velma Kellys, played a year at Mandalay Bay. "[Chicago] pushed the boundaries by just that much," says Michael Gill, the show's producer. "It was dark and cynical, and it started to expand the norm in Vegas by just that much. I loved Chicago, but we probably would have been better served had we taken out the intermission—not taken out any material, just streamlined it a bit."
For their latest venture, producers Martin and Gill wanted something that was upbeat and a proven Broadway hit—a show that would adapt easily to Vegas-style enhancements and, if necessary, shorten to 90 intermissionless minutes.
They opted for Hairspray, another Tony Best Musical winner, based on the John Waters film. "It had to say something, but say it in a very fun way. That's definitely a mandate here in Vegas…" says Gill. "It has to be artistically satisfying; it can't just be about nothing. And it also has to be commercially satisfying.