Aug 21, 2003

Oh, the Zumanity!

"This is the show that will convice gay America Vegas isn't tacky anymore"

By STEVE FRIESS

  For all its explicit and prurient hypersexuality and obvious campiness, Las Vegas has never been much of a draw for gays and lesbians. There are three all-male dance revues, but they market largely to bachelorette parties. Some hotels and wedding chapels allow same-sex wedding ceremonies, but the state's constitution explicitly prohibits them from having any legal value. And the only openly gay headliner on the Strip is Frank Marino, a drag queen, albeit a very, very good one.

Last week, though, Cirque du Soleil opened an entry to the Vegas entertainment scene that could singlehandedly change the city's image for gay people. The erotic, adults-only Zumanity at the New York-New York hotel is, at a cost of $50 million, the first genuine big-budget effort ever in America to integrate explicit homosexual content into the panorama of sexual options in a live stage production intended for mainstream consumption.

This is, quite simply, the show that will finally convince gay America that Vegas isn't tacky anymore. Zumanity will immediately place Sin City on the list of must-go destinations for queer travelers, if only because there's nothing else like it anywhere.

In this outing, Cirque was required to do something truly new to avoid diluting a market in which they already own O and Mystere. With Zumanity, as intended, the mold is broken. Whereas O and Mystere have some similar elements and have much in common with parts of the five Cirque touring productions, nobody can seriously view Zumanity in precisely the same category with its Cirque lineage.

Gone are the bright-colored costumes, replaced by, well, not a whole lot of material at all. The emcee, Greenwich Village cabaret legend Joey Arias as Mitzy LaMooche, actually speaks directly to the audience, and vocalists also sing in English, not the usual gibberish language referred to as "Cirquish." There are some breathtaking acrobatics, but the grander effort here is to make the entire theater feel kaleidoscopic and kinky through dance, lighting and clever props. With even the band members dancing and shimmying, the room always feels a bit like it's in motion.

To be sure, Zumanity is more than its gay elements. That content is merely a part of a program that works hard to show the extraordinary and varied potential for human erotic passion. In one sequence, a handsome, well-muscled dwarf pursues and, ultimately, attains the affection of a tall, beautiful blonde. A pair of obese female twins in fishnet stockings start out the show as comic relief by wandering the theater, offering the audience platters of sliced strawberries, but in the end they're very much objectified as well and welcomed into a montage of sexual images. An elderly couple are also an unlikely but welcome part of that mix, doing a sensual and touching dance number.

Still, it's the homosexual content that gives this show its cultural significance, if only because it just hasn't been done before on this scale for this diverse an audience. Cirque has offered some homoeroticism in the past-a sequence in Mystere in which the muscle-bound Lorador brothers lift and twirl each other and often have face-to-groin or groin-to-ass contact is a huge favorite for gay men-but they go so much farther here.

We're not just talking about homoerotic content, but real, live homosexual activity. A gay couple, married to one another in real life, conduct a gripping seduction dance that climaxes with them kissing for at least a half-minute. Bare-breasted women splash and grope in a life-sized fishbowl while muscle-bound studs lay helplessly and irrelevantly outside the glass.

It's worth noting that the Zumanity Theater was originally built for an excellent but short-lived show called Madhattan, in which actual performers were plucked from the sidewalks and subways of cities like New York and Chicago and compiled into a gritty Vegas variety act. The consensus as to why it failed is that it was too "urban" for conservative audiences from the Midwest. Now that there's a Cirque du Soleil erotica show in the same space, the predictable and understandable question is whether that can work as mainstream entertainment where Madhattan could not.

Or, as a columnist asked at Zumanity's premiere bash: "Can you see a straight frat boy from Indiana going home and telling his friends to go to Vegas to see a black guy and a white guy kissing each other?"

My answer: No. I expect the straight frat boy from Indiana to go home and tell his friends: "Go to Vegas and see the two topless babes do each other in a mammoth fishbowl. You gotta put up with watching some queers going at it for a few minutes, but it's so worth it." Not exactly a proud moment for gay lib, but that wasn't the question.

Near the end, during a mammoth circular orgy scene on the revolving stage, Arias lured a random male audience member on stage to insert into the action. He was led into the center and laid down intimately alongside three of the gorgeous women in the cast.

Zumanity, you must remember, is all about busting sexual boundaries and opening minds. Yet the show presumed that the guy they brought up was straight and would be titillated by the nymphs. I knew the man they brought to the stage. He's a hottie all right. He's also gay. Oops. It might be worth Cirque reconsidering that assumption, because if Zumanity does its job right and gays flock to Vegas to see it, the odds are going to become increasingly high.

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