Mom and Dad Huxtable Do Vegas : A showroom act by Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad is part of the gaming resort’s wooing of families

If it’s skin Vegas audiences want, they won’t get it from Mom and Dad Huxtable.

“There’ll be no G-strings in my show,” drawled Phylicia Rashad, ending the pronouncement with her patented “Cosby Show” giggle. She shook her finger, playfully scolding, more in the mock-serious manner of Mrs. Clair Huxtable than as the singer/dancer/actress/wife of NBC sportscaster Ahmad Rashad.

“And if there are G-strings, they’ll be under the garments so no one will see ,” she said, unsuccessfully trying to check the giggle. “No G-strings!”

The First Mom of TV sitcoms hunkered down in one corner of the broken-down black Naugahyde couch that sits in front of the stage inside the S.I.R. sound studios on Manhattan’s upper west side. As she rehearsed for her recent Las Vegas club debut, billed alongside her TV husband, Bill Cosby, Rashad unzipped a black and white ski jacket to reveal a skin-tight pink leotard underneath. She smiled. Her teeth are perfect, testimony, perhaps, to the fact that both her father and the first of her three real-life husbands were dentists.

“I mean, Las Vegas is a community I’m told, where people live who have nothing to do with show business,” she continued, peeling off another layer of cold-weather clothing as she spoke.

On the opposite side of the studio, a host of veteran musicians who have played backup to the likes of Luther Vandross, Judy Collins and Ashford and Simpson, warmed up for yet another run-through in the string of rehearsals that began six months ago.

“They’ve got a university there,” the 41-year-old actress said. “They’ve got churches there. They’ve got schools there. They’ve got people living life there!”

Indeed, Las Vegas is not what it once was. Nevada’s largest city is at least as well-known these days for UNLV Coach Jerry Tarkanian’s winning basketball team as it is for hoodlums, gambling, golf and the sunny weather.

During February in New York, Popsicle-like winds make G-strings sound more like an instrument of torture than lust. Clear and sunny Las Vegas represents another world in more ways than one. The famous Strip, where casino hotels play host to more than 18 million visitors a year, seems as contrary to the family image she and Cosby have fostered as Mr. and Mrs. Cliff Huxtable as do showgirls in a snowstorm.

And yet, Mom and Dad Huxtable have, indeed, brought their brand of good, clean family fun to Las Vegas.

Rashad is headlining alongside her TV husband through March 11 at the Hilton. In her final rehearsals two weeks ago in New York, she alternated between anxious and confident that her song-and-dance routines would be a hit, even though she’s been planning the show since July. But she has her bets covered. Any chance that showroom crowds might yawn through her renditions of “As Time Goes By” or Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed” is diminished by the advice she gets from the father figure she “married” on the Cosby show.

“Bill and I were supposed to debut in November, but the musician’s strike was still on,” Rashad said. “In January, there was some talk about some performers crossing the picket line and I talked to Bill about that and he said: ‘No, I don’t want you going in like that. You just wait.’ ”

Cosby is shrewd enough to know that crossing picket lines is a potential public relations disaster, especially for the Huxtables. The 52-year-old entertainer, who reportedly hand-picked Rashad from among dozens who auditioned for the role of Mrs. Huxtable when the sitcom was cast seven years ago, is no stranger to the Strip. Commanding more than $300,000 a week, he holds the title of No. 1 draw among the dozens of Las Vegas attractions that play the city’s showrooms and lounges each year, according to the Las Vegas News Bureau.

With typical excess, Las Vegas bills itself as “the Entertainment Capital of the World,” even though cynics gave it the more accurate, if less flattering title of “a Disneyland for adults.”

But whatever its epithet, the one-time Mormon settlement at the southern end of Nevada is arguably the last place Huxtable fans might expect to find the tube’s most popular prime-time parents.

Yet as Rashad and others point out, audiences have changed and Las Vegas has changed with them. Lounge pianists who insist on whining their version of “Feelings,” bare-breasted showgirls with Kewpie doll smiles and foul comedy a la Redd Foxx may be Strip perennials, but their appeal to balding baby boomers is limited. With the mellowing of the ‘60s generation, a new brand of entertainer is beginning to surface in Las Vegas. Sinatra still packs them in, though he has slipped to the No. 2 spot in terms of salary and audience behind Cosby. Julio Iglesias (No. 3), Wayne Newton and Englebert Humperdinck can always be depended upon to make grandmothers swoon.

But the Pointer Sisters and the , Beach Boys do all right when they come to town too. As more yuppies approach middle age, they contribute a larger share to the $4 billion lost at the casinos each year. They also demand younger entertainers for themselves and more family entertainment for their children. What could have more wholesome yuppie family appeal than, say, the Moscow Circus that had a weeklong run here last month? Or Sid and Marty Krofft’s Puppets? Or Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton appearing on the same bill for the first time in years?

So what’s so strange about Cliff and Clair Huxtable in Vegas?

“The typical Las Vegas show is still the big production that features bare-breasted showgirls,” said Las Vegas News Bureau media director Stephen Allen. “Like ‘Jubilee’ at Bally’s. It’s got 125 performers. Big production numbers.”

Allen is a former Philadelphia newspaperman who came to Las Vegas for a weekend 12 years ago and wound up staying. Until Hollywood entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian sold the MGM Grand Hotel to Bally’s in the mid-’80s, Allen was the hotel’s public relations director. Since then, he has run the non-stop press release division of the city’s convention and visitors bureau and, from that vantage point, he’s seen a subtle but clear shift in the way in which the casinos entertain their guests.

“The stereotypical visitor here used to be the guy who came here with his ‘niece’ or his girlfriend to gamble for the weekend,” Allen said. “Now these are still gambling casinos. They’re not Disneyland yet.”

But the writing is on the wall.

Witness the very face of the Strip, where the Golden Nugget’s Steve Wynn just opened a $500-million, 3,600-room hotel next to Caesars Palace last year. The 32-story marvel, called the Mirage, has a waterfall cascade system and a fiery two-story high volcano in its front courtyard that erupts regularly throughout the evening. It was such a traffic stopper along Las Vegas Boulevard that Mirage management put up a permanent sign advising motorists not to be so distracted that they caused an auto accident.

This June, another mammoth hostelry opens about a mile west, near the end of the strip adjacent to the Hacienda Hotel. Excalibur, a 4,000-room hotel built in the style of a medieval castle, is the second Strip casino built by the operators of the hugely successful Circus Circus hotel and will feature a kind of permanent Renaissance Pleasure Faire atmosphere, complete with daily jousting tournaments.

“I don’t know if you know anything about occupancy rates, but Circus Circus has a phenomenal annual percentage of 98%,” Allen said. “That’s because they cater to family business.”

Circus Circus room rates remain low ($40-$60 range). In addition, a huge recreational vehicle lot behind the casino invites families to hook up and stay awhile. Trapeze acts perform around the clock and, in a “Midway” mezzanine between the gamblers and the high-wire acts, children can play video and arcade games while they eat cotton candy and popcorn.

With Excalibur, Circus Circus owners again plan to cater to families, but they are no longer going to have a monopoly on the kiddie market.

“MGM just bought the Marina Hotel and the 147-acre Tropicana golf course next to it,” Allen said. “By the end of 1992, they plan to build a 145-acre movieland-type theme park and the biggest hotel in the world: 5,000 rooms. For the first time, Las Vegas is going to be a vacation destination, like Orlando, Fla. I mean, why would you go to Orlando if Epcot Center wasn’t there?”

At least two other “theme” hotel casinos are on the drawing boards:

* A $22-million Irish pub called O’Shea’s, to be constructed next to the Flamingo Hilton at the midway point on the Strip.

* A 3,000-room hotel adjacent to the Dunes, to be called Carnivaal. That $300-million effort is being underwritten by the Radisson Corp.

And virtually every existing Strip hotel along the five-mile stretch of neon roadway is planning a major expansion in the next two to three years. Caesars Palace will add an 875,000-square-foot shopping plaza by the end of the summer. The Sahara has added another 575 rooms. The Imperial Palace is adding another 547 rooms. The Flamingo Hilton will add another 750 rooms. And the Riviera, which will expand to 4,179 rooms over the next two years, said Allen, will temporarily become the world’s largest luxury hotel until the MGM project just down the road supersedes it.

In all, this city of about 600,000 permanent residents will have more than 80,000 hotel rooms by the mid-1990s, and most of them will cater to families.

“A reporter for Entertainment News came through here a few weeks ago and she told me, ‘Gosh, I remember staying at the youth hotel when I was a kid and my parents came here on vacation.’ Makes you feel old,” said Las Vegas Hilton publicist Carol Stewart.

The fact is Las Vegas’ oldest and best-known kids’ hotel--the Las Vegas Hilton youth hotel--is just about 20 years old, said Stewart. The 120-room wing of the venerable Hilton at the northeast end of the Strip blazed the trail for the families that are now flooding the city. Early on, Hilton executives understood that mothers and fathers would be far more likely to go gambling if they didn’t have to worry about keeping the children amused. So they did it for them.

“The youth hotel’s got a pool table and video arcade and just about everything a kid would want: popcorn, hot dogs, hamburgers, a regular kids’ menu,” Stewart said. “Special little Murphy beds that come out of the wall and make the place into a dormitory. Supervised child care. Entertainment. It’s tailored to children.”

And slowly, showroom entertainment is becoming more palatable to small fry too.

“Splash!,” a typical vaudevillian revue in an indefinite run at the Riviera Hotel, has a family version at 8 p.m. and a topless version at 11 p.m. The most expensive show on the Strip these days--Siegfried & Roy’s $60-a-seat wild animal extravaganza--is also the most Barnum and Bailey-esque.

As far as music, the real-life yuppie families who visit Vegas increasingly reflect the upscale tastes of the make-believe Huxtables.

“David Sanborn is a jazz musician we booked recently for three nights,” Stewart said. “The first night, the room wasn’t full but, then, the second and third night, he sold out. I think that’s a definite trend: shorter runs for entertainers with an intense following. No banter or dirty jokes or fancy girls or dancing. Just music. The straight goods.”

Broad appeal entertainers who can pack the evolving gambler audience into the showrooms are harder and harder to find, let alone to persuade to work up acts for Vegas, she said.

“Did you watch the Grammys ?” she asked. “You can see the incredible changes going on in the music business.

“If you were thinking of buying any of those acts to try and sell out an 1,800-seat showroom every night, which one would it be? Of all the people I saw on the Grammys, Bonnie Raitt would probably be the only one that could even think of filling a showroom.

“The others may be new and interesting and have tremendous value within the industry, but for the kind of people that go to showrooms and the market you’re dealing with, I don’t think they’re going to come and see a rap group, for instance.”

Despite the new wave of post-World War II moms and dads who are winding their way into the casinos, and dragging their children along with them, Las Vegas continues to attract a particular type of tourist, bred on television and facing middle age with a relatively good line of credit.

“People who have enough money to come here and pay the price to go into these showrooms are not interested in rap or Milli Vanilli,” Stewart said. “I’ll probably be proven completely wrong in the next few years, but the ones who seem to endure are the ones who have real traditional talents. Who can really sing and can really do what they are purported to do, not just thrill the crowd because they’ve got 8,000 synthesizers behind them.”

“Don’t you find that in moments of purest inspiration that there is that which is greater than your personality?” asked Phylicia Rashad. Yes, an interviewer answered tentatively. But what does that have to do with playing Vegas?

“Right. OK. I’ve been practicing Sita yoga now for almost 10 years and when I first met Swami Mustananada, it was at a creativity conference,” she continued, the words spilling out of her with a pleasant, manic urgency. “And he started his talk after welcoming people with love ! and respect ! Because he said that was the highest action that a human being could perform: To welcome another human being with love and respect. He said that was true religion. That was worship of God.”

But, Vegas?

“And after he made that statement, he said, ‘God is the great actor of the universe and he is playing many parts. He is the star of the show’, “ continued a woman who sounded less and less like Clair Huxtable with each sentence.

“And then he went on to talk about creative process and about that energy, about that intelligence, about that source from which inspiration springs which is really one’s very own self!”

All around her, musical bedlam is breaking loose. The bass player is dancing on stage while the piano player plays football out on the floor with the percussionist. A couple of dancers twitch and sway on the opposite side of the S.I.R. studio while Rashad’s choreographer, Michael Peters performs a lithe leap reminiscent of the steps he taught Michael Jackson for the now-legendary “Beat It!” music video.

But Rashad remains calm. She lets the concept of mantra sink in for a moment, her seemingly permanently smiling eyes crinkled at the corners.

What she’s driving at, she says, is that it all ties in. She can’t perform for two hours on stage before a Vegas audience without her mantra routine: one hour of chanting in a silent room she has set aside strictly for meditation every morning.

It is the same mantra that the monks spoke throughout “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” she says. The mantra is a panacea she draws upon whenever the frustrations of getting a vocal arrangement or a dance step just right prove too overwhelming. It’s scientifically proven, she says. The brain waves flatten out when the mantra takes over. It gives her the power to concentrate, to focus and to let go--to let her act happen instead of making it happen.

“I’m not worried about it,” she says about her appearance before the TV-fed family audience that is sure to come see her and Mr. Huxtable on stage. “I’m really not worried about it. I know better. I sit quietly for that hour every single day and experience that witness inside. Experience that part of yourself that watches the movements of the mind.”

Armed with her New-Age consciousness, Phylicia Rashad is more than prepared to gamble on a New Age audience in the heart of Sin City. It seems appropriate somehow.

“Ohhhm naah mashi vaya,” she says out above the din inside the studio. “Ohhhhhhhhm naahh mashi vaya.”

She grins her perfect grin and giggles.

“All right! I’m ready!” she says, displaying a girlishness Cliff Huxtable’s wife would never show. But, then, Mrs. Huxtable would probably never play Vegas, regardless of who was in the audience.