June 10, 2007
What Opens in Vegas Closes in Vegas
Six reasons Broadway isn’t boffo in Sin City.
By Steve Friess
As the Avenue Q score began to play, a giddy billionaire
cooed in my ear. “There’s nothing quite like a Broadway overture,
is there?” Steve Wynn whispered at a Vegas preview back in 2005.
Well, maybe on Broadway. But the man who upscaled the Strip
in the nineties, with fine art and mass-scale high-end dining,
aimed to do it for theater, buying Avenue Q and then Spamalot
for his new resort. Wynn’s rarely wrong, and by now, the Strip
was to boast five Tony winners, the other three being The Phantom
of the Opera, Hairspray, and The Producers. But Q closed after
nine months; Hairspray after four. By January 2007, Wynn appeared
at a Spamalot preview joking that the Monty Python comedy would
put a final nail in the coffin of his theater experiment. Since
then, he’s been filling the house with discounted tickets. Only
Phantom and Mamma Mia! appear to have a future. (Executives
at a competing casino are said to have made bets on whether
Spamalot or The Producers, which opened in February, will close
first.) Why is theater an even dicier business in Vegas than
in Times Square?
Tonys mean nothing here.
A big stage name in New York has scant clout in Vegas. If
you’re Céline Dion, fine, but when Hairspray imported Harvey
Fierstein, Joe Omaha yawned. The Producers did better with David
Hasselhoff. But will anyone care about John O’Hurley as King
Arthur?
Neither do reviews.
On Broadway, even for touristy shows, momentum builds among
regular theatergoers and tastemakers, who read the Times. Vegas
has neither of those groups, and therefore critics don’t matter
one bit, even if millions are spent on lavish parties to impress
them. Casinos would do better to hold a month of free shows
for locals, whose advice to tourists means far more than stuff
written in newspapers tourists don’t read.
Just wow me.
Wynn blamed Q’s demise on its lack of pizzazz but canceled
plans for a vaguely defined Spamalot Experience. Mistake. Phantom
spent a fortune on a one-ton chandelier that terrifies audiences
by plummeting to within ten feet of their heads. That’s Vegas-style
spectacle.
A failure to communicate.
To appreciate the wit of Q, The Producers, or Spamalot, one
must understand English. Many Vegas tourists hail from overseas;
even more are wasted. They just want to watch, not think. And
an appreciation of Pythonesque irony is out of the question.
A pause does not refresh.
Vegas’s audience is a TV-trained crowd that gets restless
at the 55-minute mark. During Avenue Q, people fled at intermission.
So Wynn ditched the break and offered a 90-minute cut, whereupon
theater purists howled. It’s lose-lose, as Hairspray also found.
The trimmed-down Producers leaves Ulla just one solo. Why bother?
Familiarity breeds success.
Mamma Mia! has somehow succeeded by breaking the rules. No
effects. A story. A second act. A zillion touring companies.
Still, it’s a smash, because everyone knows the music. Any Spamalot
tunes charted lately? That’s why two Broadway hits, Grease and
Jersey Boys, do have Vegas potential—and the latter opens on
the Strip in early 2008.
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