June 22, 2007 * THE STRIP SENSE

A colossal stinker is in the making at Planet Hollywood

By STEVE FRIESS

Not since "Le Reve" opened to audience members horrified by bellyflopping pregnant women has a Las Vegas show opened to worse word of mouth than the Hans Klok-Pam Anderson disaster "The Beauty of Magic" at the Planet Hollywood.

It does not give me any joy to write that. OK, maybe a teeny, tiny bit because they spent all this money - millions, if you buy the rumors which I do not -- on the "Baywatch" and "Borat" star and yet Ms. Anderson refuses to do any significant one-on-one interviews. The show has lost at least a page in Newsweek over that, and a show this terrible needs all the press it can get.

Did I mention it's terrible? That the audience is forced to wade through 50 minutes of decoy blondes before Anderson finally is revealed in tepid fashion, popping through a door frame covered by a swimsuit poster of her? That Klok, allegedly all the rage in Europe, provides a Whitman's Sampler of magic tricks seen elsewhere on the Strip, with morsels of Siegfried and Roy, David Copperfield, Lance Burton and even the round-the-corner rival Steve Wyrick. Once Pam does arrive, she's there for about 10 minutes all told, does three tricks and trades very sophomoric banter with Klok that includes such junior-high puns as, well, Klok and the male genitalia slang you'd get if you removed the "l."

Don't believe me? Here's the Review-Journal's Mike Weatherford, who graded it a C- and wrote: "I'm tempted to recommend 'The Beauty of Magic' as a throwback for anyone who misses the Siegfried & Roy show, circa 1993. Except that nobody ever had to wait an hour for Roy to show up. You have to sit through about 50 minutes of pointing and posturing from Dutch magician Hans Klok to get 10 or 12 minutes of Pam Anderson, the marquee star whose micro-shorts were meant to add contemporary interest to this dated and unintentionally campy magic revue at Planet Hollywood."

And Amy Turner of the "Grits to Glitz" podcast echoed succinctly: "Here's my review: Don't go. My heavens was it bad." The Las Vegas Sun didn't even review it. And the only folks who seemed to get anything out of it was Las Vegas Magazine, which shocked the pants of me with this claim destined for promotional posters: "Klok creates wonder, amazement and curiosity - a deep-down feeling of being blown away as you ask yourself, 'How did he do that?' "

I respectfully and vigorously disagree. The sense of wonder is how a major Vegas resort could have so badly miscalculated and the sense of curiosity is reserved for what happens now.

That is, how long can Planet Hollywood stick with this stinker and how humiliating would it be to pull the plug sooner rather than later? There are signs that, two weeks along, there's weak demand: A group called HouseseatsLV.Com had been given free seats to give away to its members on the second weekend the show was open. Their members pay a flat annual fee and are offered free seats at short notice in a practice known in the business as "papering" an audience, which is a funny way of saying they fill seats so paying customers aren't lonely.

With "Le Reve," Steve Wynn had a $40 million custom-built theater and the genius of Franco Dragone to contend with, making it for both reasons easier to massage the show into something more pleasing than to toss it out wholesale. But because it was Dragone, the eclectic mastermind behind other inscrutable shows as "O" and "Mystere," it was easier to alter it in the name of "artistic adjustments."

With "The Beauty of Magic," they'd have to teach old Hans some new tricks that nobody's seen before. And Pam would actually have to risk breaking a fingernail.

I'm a big fan of what Robert Earl has done with the former Aladdin. The casino's sleeker, the themed rooms are brilliant, "Stomp Out Loud" should work well, the new lounges are nice. Sometimes I worry that he uses celebrity for the sake of celebrity and not for any logical or natural purpose - as if they're a zoo exhibit at the Extra Lounge and particularly in the baffling case of his "sports ambassadors" Sugar Ray Leonard, Roger Clemens and the barely ambulatory Pete Sampras.

But mostly I believe he knows what he's doing. I just think that he didn't do his homework on Klok and the comparable magic shows on the Strip. Or, perhaps, some of the curse that tanked the failure he bought, a 5-year-old, $1 billion resort in a primo location in the middle of a boomtown, still lingers.

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