Naked puppets? Just one of many attractions in Las Vegas
LAS VEGAS — Yeah, yeah, yeah. What happens here, stays here. But here’s a flash from my latest visit to Sin City, where I reviewed a racy new show. When hand puppets are naked, they have no bottoms!
Las Vegas is celebrating its 100th anniversary as an entertainment oasis in the desert, and a lot has changed since the early years when cowboys and construction workers chased hookers across the sawdust floors of saloons, followed later by mobsters chasing leggy showgirls through neon-lit casinos.
The hookers and showgirls are still here, but the town now draws some 37 million visitors a year, many of them intent on indulging themselves at the swanky resorts, where gambling is taking a back seat to five-star restaurants, high-brow art galleries and top-rated shows such as “Avenue Q,” a randy cousin of Sesame Street with puppets having sex on stage.
The man most responsible for upping the ante of the art and entertainment level of Las Vegas is Steve Wynn, whose new namesake resort, the 50-story, shimmering Wynn Las Vegas, opened earlier this year and at $2.7 billion is his most ambitious and expensive project yet.
In his previous pursuits, Wynn put a flaming volcano in front of the Mirage, battling pirate ships in front of Treasure Island and dancing waters in front of Bellagio. This time, he hid Wynn Las Vegas’ signature attraction, the Lake of Dreams, behind a manmade, 140-foot-high mountain of pines and waterfalls, so the lake is visible only from within the resort.
By day, the three-acre lake has water cascading down a wall at its rear, with several life-sized bronze figures standing on the surface. By night, the lake comes alive every 30 minutes with colors and scenes projected on the wall and water, and a holographic image of a face magically appearing.
It’s a splashy presentation, and goes well with the rest of the pricey resort.
Here’s Wynn by the numbers:
* $6 was the entrance fee to the gallery housing Steve Wynn’s private art collection. There are only 15 paintings displayed, but you might recognize some of the artists: Degas, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir. There’s also a triptych Andy Warhol did of Wynn in 1983, when Wynn ran a casino in Atlantic City. “We finally found a place to put them,” Wynn says in the audio tour.
* $10 was the lowest bet allowed at a blackjack table.
* $34 was the bill for the resort’s dinner buffet, where I had shrimp and crab cocktail, six kinds of sushi, duck salad, carved rack of lamb, grilled Pacific salmon and Bananas Foster for dessert. Chefs working behind the line kept everything filled and fresh.
* $239 to $850 was the cost of the rooms available over the next weekdays. The resort has 2,700 rooms and suites, and all were booked over the following two weekends during a visit earlier this month.
* $500 was the tab for a round of golf on the resort’s 18-hole course, which has 18 villas overlooking the fairways and renting for $2,000 per night.
* $269,900 was the sticker price for a 2005 Ferrari F430 at the resort’s Ferrari-Maserati dealership. A 2003 Ferrari Enzo was valued at $1.2 million, but not for sale. And they get lousy mileage and have no trunk space. This may be the country’s sole dealership that charges $10 to get in, to keep out the gawkers.
Wynn is not the only new luxury offering on the Strip. MGM Grand has opened a 700-room, boutique-style West Wing and also added the Skylofts, two-story suites that start at $800 a night. Bellagio has a new 928-room Spa Tower and THEhotel at Mandalay Bay has 1,117 sleek suites. And the construction cranes are still going strong along Las Vegas Boulevard.
During my visit, Wynn was in Macao, where he’s building a $700 million resort to tap into the growing Chinese gambling market. He also has announced plans to construct a sister next to Wynn Las Vegas, to be called Encore.
While I was in town, the local newspaper reprinted the cover of a Life Magazine article that asked whether Las Vegas was overextending itself. “Gambling Boom Town Las Vegas Pushes Its Luck” was the headline.
The city, however, is having the last laugh. The article was printed in 1955, when Las Vegas was marking its 50th.
Now, on to the newest shows in Vegas, and those sexy puppets. But first, the leggy showgirls.
The woman selling tickets to the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana asked whether I wanted to attend the early or late show. What’s the difference, I replied? The late show is topless, she answered.
Some decisions are easier than others.
The Folies opened in 1959 and is the city’s longest-running show, a souvenir of the old Las Vegas. The dancers are tall and lithe — not a gram of cellulite on this stage — and wear a lot of sparkles and feathers, and not much else.
The show also has male dancers and a host, Dan O’Brien, who was a half-foot shorter than some of the females. There are a lot of costume changes as the story line traces the history of women — from the hoop skirt balls of the 1850s, to the flappers of the 1920s, to the prom queens of the 1960s, to the flower children of the 1970s.
The most exciting scene was an acrobatic can-can in a Parisian cafe, with the trusting female dancers doing swan dives off the balcony into the waiting arms of their male counterparts.
The Folies was a modest display of flesh when compared to Sin City’s newer skin shows, and what goes on nightly in the clubs. The most erotic production in the Folies featured 10 women in neon outfits glowing in a blacklight stage. They stripped off their clothes, and were invisible in the dark.
Tickets for the show: $52 to $63.
You know you’re seeing Blue Man Group when plastic ponchos are handed out to the customers in the first five rows. I was in Row 8, just out of range of the paint and the marshmallows and the Cap’n Crunch.
The three guys starring in Bluephoria, the retooled and relocated (to the Venetian) Las Vegas show, looked the same as the cast I had seen in the Chicago production. Bald, earless, mute, their skin covered in a blue slime. They were gentle and innocent — except when crawling over the seats into the audience on the prowl for a victim to share in a Twinkie feast on stage.
The new Las Vegas show, which opened last month, has the same tribal-techno music, heavy on the drumbeats, and the same themes that may, or may not be, critical of contemporary art and culture. What else could they be saying when they catch paint balls in their mouths, spray the contents onto spinning canvases and place a $4,000 price tag on the finished op-art product?
Another painting was devised with the help of an audience “volunteer,” who was put in a helmet and white jumpsuit, covered with blue paint, hoisted upside down and swung against a white sheet, leaving the blue imprint of his body. (Methinks the helmeted volunteer might have been swapped backstage for a paid stand-in.)
And nobody plays PVC piping like these boys in blue.
The audience, as usual, was draped in an undulating avalanche of crepe paper for the finale.
The Brit sitting behind me had a one-word initial reaction. “Wow.”
“Never seen anything like that in my life,” he added.
Tickets for the show: $88 to $126.
Ka, the latest extravaganza from Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil, is playing at MGM Grand and is said to be the most expensive live show ever staged, with a price tag of around $200 million. It has the same creative costuming and acrobatic performances as Mystere, O and Zumanity, the other three Cirque shows in town.
But Ka has more of a story line than the previous dreamy productions: Twins, a boy and girl, are separated when an evil warlord and his army of archers assassinates their family. The twins spend the next 90 minutes trying to find each other, in a surreal world of icy mountaintops, ocean depths and beaches where giant crabs and starfish burrow out from the sand.
There is no dialogue, and the real star of the show is the mammoth stage, which uses hydraulics to float and swivel and stand on end. It is a royal barge twirling down a river, a sailing ship tossed violently over stormy seas and a vertical battleground where tethered warriors glide over the tilted surface, with the vanquished sliding off into the darkened abyss below.
The athletic performers, their skin covered with tribal tattoos, are topped by a pair of stout men running inside round cages like hamsters. The two wheels are mounted on the ends of a swiftly revolving arm, with the men running faster and faster. Soon, they climb outside and are sprinting on the tops of the cages, at times leaping to keep from being tossed off.
Whew, I got tired watching. But, amazingly, I made it all the way to the midnight climax without a yawn.
Tickets for the show: $99 to $150.
La Reve, directed by Cirque veteran Franco Dragone, opened to less-than-lukewarm reviews at Wynn. Redundant was the key word. So, I opted for the resort’s other show, and spent the evening with the bawdy puppets of “Avenue Q.”
The hand puppets are on the arms of very visible performers, and it’s difficult sometimes to know whom to watch. Another character is a human, a woman who plays Gary Coleman. Yep, that Gary Coleman, and she has the same cherubic smile.
A sign behind the ticket counter bore this disclaimer: “Avenue Q has not been authorized or approved in any manner by the Jim Henson Company, or Sesame workshop.” The furry faces are familiar, but they’re singing a different tune.
The first song in the musical was “It Sucks to Be Me,” followed by “If You Were Gay,” “Everybody’s a Little Racist,” “The Internet is for Porn,” “I’m Not Wearing Underwear Today” and “You Can Be as Loud as You Want When Making Love.”
Which the two main puppets, Princeton and Kate Monster, do quite vigorously on stage. They later break up, and Kate hurls a lucky penny that Princeton gave her off the Empire State Building. Unfortunately, it lands on the head of Princeton’s new sex interest, Lucy the Slut, and she’s mortally injured.
“Avenue Q” won a Tony on Broadway in 2004, and some of those stars are appearing in the Wynn production.
It’s poignant and profane at the same time, and loaded with full-throttle belly laughs.
Bert and Ernie will never seem the same.
Ticket price: $88 to $99.
It’s another Wynn for Las Vegas
The price tag of $2.7 billion qualifies Wynn Las Vegas as the most expensive hotel-casino ever built. So what do you get for a few billion?
Fake grass, for one thing.
While Steve Wynn’s previous Las Vegas resorts — Mirage, Treasure Island and Bellagio — had wondrous features out front for the pedestrians on the Strip to gawk at, Wynn Las Vegas is hidden behind a mountain landscaped with pine trees, flowering shrubs and perfect grass that will never need mowing.
Walk into the front entrance and you’re immediately struck by a barrage of color in the paintings behind the registration desk, in the floral mosaics in the marble floor, and on the spheres of flowers that hang in the trees like giant Christmas ornaments. The trees, by the way, also will never need watering.
Wynn explains his love for color in the self-narrated audio tour of the hotel’s art gallery, which is filled with its owner’s collection of impressionist masterpieces.
“They’re all very colorful,” he says. “I love the richness of color, and it’s obvious around the hotel, and it’s certainly evident in my preference for different painters and their works.”
There may be another reason for Wynn’s predilection for bold colors and patterns. He suffers from an incurable genetic disease that gradually is robbing him of his eyesight.
Carpeting with bold free-form flowers on a red background led to my room, which had walls covered in a fabric that I call orange and they call apricotta. The room had a king-sized bed facing the window, which looked out onto the pool. The room was nice-sized, but the bathroom was huge, with a double sink, glass shower enclosure, tub and separate commode cubicle. The bathroom had a flat-screen TV and a telephone.
Another telephone and flat-screen TV in the room had my name on the LCD displays, so I knew I was in the right place. There was a fax machine and high-speed Internet ports. A tray on top of the mini-bar had candy, nuts and Fiji bottled water; lift an item off the tray and if you don’t return it within 60 seconds it will be magically charged to your room.
The room-service offerings included afternoon tea served with scones and salmon finger sandwiches for $35 per person. Appetizers ranged from shrimp cocktail for $16 to shellfish on ice for $110.
The bed — ah, the bed — had five fluffy pillows, a pillow-top mattress and Egyptian cotton sheets with a 310 thread count. But who was counting?
While the pool area seemed cramped even when it wasn’t overly crowded, the spa earned rave reviews and was said to be a sanctuary of tranquility. The Esplanade shopping arcade has two dozen boutiques with all the pricey names — Chanel, Dior, Vuitton, Cartier, de la Renta. If you have anything left, head to the Ferrari-Maserati dealership on the other side of the building.
Overall, the hotel was gorgeous, with every nook and tabletop filled with art, much of it with an Oriental theme.
But Wynn had established a high-water mark with the sumptuous Bellagio, and the enormous expectations for Wynn Las Vegas left some visitors with a been-there, done-that response.
There is one aspect of Wynn Las Vegas that sets the bar higher than any other hotel, anywhere, has yet to clear.
Wynn is a foodie, and for his new endeavor he gathered some of America’s finest chefs — Stephen Kalt, Daniel Boulud, Mark LoRusso, Alessandro Stratta — and created perfect settings for them to display their wares. And while celebrity chefs are nothing new in Las Vegas, Wynn demanded that his stars actually be in the kitchen cooking, not merely lending their names.
Wynn claims to have the finest collection of chefs under one roof in the country.
“It’s a roundtable,” he says, “and all the knights are here.”
And guess who’s King Arthur?
Las Vegas is celebrating its 100th anniversary as an entertainment oasis in the desert, and a lot has changed since the early years when cowboys and construction workers chased hookers across the sawdust floors of saloons, followed later by mobsters chasing leggy showgirls through neon-lit casinos.
The hookers and showgirls are still here, but the town now draws some 37 million visitors a year, many of them intent on indulging themselves at the swanky resorts, where gambling is taking a back seat to five-star restaurants, high-brow art galleries and top-rated shows such as “Avenue Q,” a randy cousin of Sesame Street with puppets having sex on stage.
The man most responsible for upping the ante of the art and entertainment level of Las Vegas is Steve Wynn, whose new namesake resort, the 50-story, shimmering Wynn Las Vegas, opened earlier this year and at $2.7 billion is his most ambitious and expensive project yet.
In his previous pursuits, Wynn put a flaming volcano in front of the Mirage, battling pirate ships in front of Treasure Island and dancing waters in front of Bellagio. This time, he hid Wynn Las Vegas’ signature attraction, the Lake of Dreams, behind a manmade, 140-foot-high mountain of pines and waterfalls, so the lake is visible only from within the resort.
By day, the three-acre lake has water cascading down a wall at its rear, with several life-sized bronze figures standing on the surface. By night, the lake comes alive every 30 minutes with colors and scenes projected on the wall and water, and a holographic image of a face magically appearing.
It’s a splashy presentation, and goes well with the rest of the pricey resort.
Here’s Wynn by the numbers:
* $6 was the entrance fee to the gallery housing Steve Wynn’s private art collection. There are only 15 paintings displayed, but you might recognize some of the artists: Degas, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir. There’s also a triptych Andy Warhol did of Wynn in 1983, when Wynn ran a casino in Atlantic City. “We finally found a place to put them,” Wynn says in the audio tour.
* $10 was the lowest bet allowed at a blackjack table.
* $34 was the bill for the resort’s dinner buffet, where I had shrimp and crab cocktail, six kinds of sushi, duck salad, carved rack of lamb, grilled Pacific salmon and Bananas Foster for dessert. Chefs working behind the line kept everything filled and fresh.
* $239 to $850 was the cost of the rooms available over the next weekdays. The resort has 2,700 rooms and suites, and all were booked over the following two weekends during a visit earlier this month.
* $500 was the tab for a round of golf on the resort’s 18-hole course, which has 18 villas overlooking the fairways and renting for $2,000 per night.
* $269,900 was the sticker price for a 2005 Ferrari F430 at the resort’s Ferrari-Maserati dealership. A 2003 Ferrari Enzo was valued at $1.2 million, but not for sale. And they get lousy mileage and have no trunk space. This may be the country’s sole dealership that charges $10 to get in, to keep out the gawkers.
Wynn is not the only new luxury offering on the Strip. MGM Grand has opened a 700-room, boutique-style West Wing and also added the Skylofts, two-story suites that start at $800 a night. Bellagio has a new 928-room Spa Tower and THEhotel at Mandalay Bay has 1,117 sleek suites. And the construction cranes are still going strong along Las Vegas Boulevard.
During my visit, Wynn was in Macao, where he’s building a $700 million resort to tap into the growing Chinese gambling market. He also has announced plans to construct a sister next to Wynn Las Vegas, to be called Encore.
While I was in town, the local newspaper reprinted the cover of a Life Magazine article that asked whether Las Vegas was overextending itself. “Gambling Boom Town Las Vegas Pushes Its Luck” was the headline.
The city, however, is having the last laugh. The article was printed in 1955, when Las Vegas was marking its 50th.
Now, on to the newest shows in Vegas, and those sexy puppets. But first, the leggy showgirls.
The woman selling tickets to the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana asked whether I wanted to attend the early or late show. What’s the difference, I replied? The late show is topless, she answered.
Some decisions are easier than others.
The Folies opened in 1959 and is the city’s longest-running show, a souvenir of the old Las Vegas. The dancers are tall and lithe — not a gram of cellulite on this stage — and wear a lot of sparkles and feathers, and not much else.
The show also has male dancers and a host, Dan O’Brien, who was a half-foot shorter than some of the females. There are a lot of costume changes as the story line traces the history of women — from the hoop skirt balls of the 1850s, to the flappers of the 1920s, to the prom queens of the 1960s, to the flower children of the 1970s.
The most exciting scene was an acrobatic can-can in a Parisian cafe, with the trusting female dancers doing swan dives off the balcony into the waiting arms of their male counterparts.
The Folies was a modest display of flesh when compared to Sin City’s newer skin shows, and what goes on nightly in the clubs. The most erotic production in the Folies featured 10 women in neon outfits glowing in a blacklight stage. They stripped off their clothes, and were invisible in the dark.
Tickets for the show: $52 to $63.
You know you’re seeing Blue Man Group when plastic ponchos are handed out to the customers in the first five rows. I was in Row 8, just out of range of the paint and the marshmallows and the Cap’n Crunch.
The three guys starring in Bluephoria, the retooled and relocated (to the Venetian) Las Vegas show, looked the same as the cast I had seen in the Chicago production. Bald, earless, mute, their skin covered in a blue slime. They were gentle and innocent — except when crawling over the seats into the audience on the prowl for a victim to share in a Twinkie feast on stage.
The new Las Vegas show, which opened last month, has the same tribal-techno music, heavy on the drumbeats, and the same themes that may, or may not be, critical of contemporary art and culture. What else could they be saying when they catch paint balls in their mouths, spray the contents onto spinning canvases and place a $4,000 price tag on the finished op-art product?
Another painting was devised with the help of an audience “volunteer,” who was put in a helmet and white jumpsuit, covered with blue paint, hoisted upside down and swung against a white sheet, leaving the blue imprint of his body. (Methinks the helmeted volunteer might have been swapped backstage for a paid stand-in.)
And nobody plays PVC piping like these boys in blue.
The audience, as usual, was draped in an undulating avalanche of crepe paper for the finale.
The Brit sitting behind me had a one-word initial reaction. “Wow.”
“Never seen anything like that in my life,” he added.
Tickets for the show: $88 to $126.
Ka, the latest extravaganza from Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil, is playing at MGM Grand and is said to be the most expensive live show ever staged, with a price tag of around $200 million. It has the same creative costuming and acrobatic performances as Mystere, O and Zumanity, the other three Cirque shows in town.
But Ka has more of a story line than the previous dreamy productions: Twins, a boy and girl, are separated when an evil warlord and his army of archers assassinates their family. The twins spend the next 90 minutes trying to find each other, in a surreal world of icy mountaintops, ocean depths and beaches where giant crabs and starfish burrow out from the sand.
There is no dialogue, and the real star of the show is the mammoth stage, which uses hydraulics to float and swivel and stand on end. It is a royal barge twirling down a river, a sailing ship tossed violently over stormy seas and a vertical battleground where tethered warriors glide over the tilted surface, with the vanquished sliding off into the darkened abyss below.
The athletic performers, their skin covered with tribal tattoos, are topped by a pair of stout men running inside round cages like hamsters. The two wheels are mounted on the ends of a swiftly revolving arm, with the men running faster and faster. Soon, they climb outside and are sprinting on the tops of the cages, at times leaping to keep from being tossed off.
Whew, I got tired watching. But, amazingly, I made it all the way to the midnight climax without a yawn.
Tickets for the show: $99 to $150.
La Reve, directed by Cirque veteran Franco Dragone, opened to less-than-lukewarm reviews at Wynn. Redundant was the key word. So, I opted for the resort’s other show, and spent the evening with the bawdy puppets of “Avenue Q.”
The hand puppets are on the arms of very visible performers, and it’s difficult sometimes to know whom to watch. Another character is a human, a woman who plays Gary Coleman. Yep, that Gary Coleman, and she has the same cherubic smile.
A sign behind the ticket counter bore this disclaimer: “Avenue Q has not been authorized or approved in any manner by the Jim Henson Company, or Sesame workshop.” The furry faces are familiar, but they’re singing a different tune.
The first song in the musical was “It Sucks to Be Me,” followed by “If You Were Gay,” “Everybody’s a Little Racist,” “The Internet is for Porn,” “I’m Not Wearing Underwear Today” and “You Can Be as Loud as You Want When Making Love.”
Which the two main puppets, Princeton and Kate Monster, do quite vigorously on stage. They later break up, and Kate hurls a lucky penny that Princeton gave her off the Empire State Building. Unfortunately, it lands on the head of Princeton’s new sex interest, Lucy the Slut, and she’s mortally injured.
“Avenue Q” won a Tony on Broadway in 2004, and some of those stars are appearing in the Wynn production.
It’s poignant and profane at the same time, and loaded with full-throttle belly laughs.
Bert and Ernie will never seem the same.
Ticket price: $88 to $99.
It’s another Wynn for Las Vegas
The price tag of $2.7 billion qualifies Wynn Las Vegas as the most expensive hotel-casino ever built. So what do you get for a few billion?
Fake grass, for one thing.
While Steve Wynn’s previous Las Vegas resorts — Mirage, Treasure Island and Bellagio — had wondrous features out front for the pedestrians on the Strip to gawk at, Wynn Las Vegas is hidden behind a mountain landscaped with pine trees, flowering shrubs and perfect grass that will never need mowing.
Walk into the front entrance and you’re immediately struck by a barrage of color in the paintings behind the registration desk, in the floral mosaics in the marble floor, and on the spheres of flowers that hang in the trees like giant Christmas ornaments. The trees, by the way, also will never need watering.
Wynn explains his love for color in the self-narrated audio tour of the hotel’s art gallery, which is filled with its owner’s collection of impressionist masterpieces.
“They’re all very colorful,” he says. “I love the richness of color, and it’s obvious around the hotel, and it’s certainly evident in my preference for different painters and their works.”
There may be another reason for Wynn’s predilection for bold colors and patterns. He suffers from an incurable genetic disease that gradually is robbing him of his eyesight.
Carpeting with bold free-form flowers on a red background led to my room, which had walls covered in a fabric that I call orange and they call apricotta. The room had a king-sized bed facing the window, which looked out onto the pool. The room was nice-sized, but the bathroom was huge, with a double sink, glass shower enclosure, tub and separate commode cubicle. The bathroom had a flat-screen TV and a telephone.
Another telephone and flat-screen TV in the room had my name on the LCD displays, so I knew I was in the right place. There was a fax machine and high-speed Internet ports. A tray on top of the mini-bar had candy, nuts and Fiji bottled water; lift an item off the tray and if you don’t return it within 60 seconds it will be magically charged to your room.
The room-service offerings included afternoon tea served with scones and salmon finger sandwiches for $35 per person. Appetizers ranged from shrimp cocktail for $16 to shellfish on ice for $110.
The bed — ah, the bed — had five fluffy pillows, a pillow-top mattress and Egyptian cotton sheets with a 310 thread count. But who was counting?
While the pool area seemed cramped even when it wasn’t overly crowded, the spa earned rave reviews and was said to be a sanctuary of tranquility. The Esplanade shopping arcade has two dozen boutiques with all the pricey names — Chanel, Dior, Vuitton, Cartier, de la Renta. If you have anything left, head to the Ferrari-Maserati dealership on the other side of the building.
Overall, the hotel was gorgeous, with every nook and tabletop filled with art, much of it with an Oriental theme.
But Wynn had established a high-water mark with the sumptuous Bellagio, and the enormous expectations for Wynn Las Vegas left some visitors with a been-there, done-that response.
There is one aspect of Wynn Las Vegas that sets the bar higher than any other hotel, anywhere, has yet to clear.
Wynn is a foodie, and for his new endeavor he gathered some of America’s finest chefs — Stephen Kalt, Daniel Boulud, Mark LoRusso, Alessandro Stratta — and created perfect settings for them to display their wares. And while celebrity chefs are nothing new in Las Vegas, Wynn demanded that his stars actually be in the kitchen cooking, not merely lending their names.
Wynn claims to have the finest collection of chefs under one roof in the country.
“It’s a roundtable,” he says, “and all the knights are here.”
And guess who’s King Arthur?
Copyright © 2002-2008 Lincoln Journal Star. All rights reserved.