COVER STORY : Beneath the Glitter, the Arts : With UNLV as the catalyst, a city beyond the Strip is developing a creative environment for music, dance, theater and art

Just two miles from the Strip, pulsating in all its neon splendor, a nationally known ensemble, the Waverly Consort, is singing Renaissance madrigals and airs accompanied by a period lute and recorders.

Dressed in austere gowns with minimal jewelry, the women could have stepped out of a painting by Raphael, and there is not a tuxedo, microphone or glitter-encrusted set in sight.

To most of the area’s 20 million annual visitors, culture in Las Vegas means entertainer Wayne Newton, the Siegfried & Roy magic show and the Liberace Museum, home of the world’s largest rhinestone.

But “beyond the neon,” as a city promotional package puts it, lies Las Vegas’ best-kept secret--a small but burgeoning arts scene. Hardly the stuff to send New Yorkers or Californians into paroxysms of envy, it represents a serious effort in a community desperate to shake off the inferiority complex that goes along with its Sin City image.

The catalyst for this development is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a school with a swelling student population of 19,000 that is bent on proving it is not just a shell for its Runnin’ Rebels basketball team. Many of the biggest names in classical music--from Itzhak Perlman to Leontyne Price--have played Vegas as part of the university’s Charles Vanda Master Series.

Las Vegas also boasts dozens of resident arts organizations, including the respected 19-year-old Nevada Dance Theatre, the Nevada Opera Theatre, four community theaters, a symphony orchestra and several chamber music ensembles. The university-based Sierra Wind Quartet was recently praised in the New York Times as a group that “discourages the usual image of Las Vegas as a purveyor of sin, bad taste and tough college basketball.”

Even the Clark County Library system has its own chamber music orchestra.

At the same time, a small cadre of visual artists has sprouted amid the neon and chaparral to take advantage of the good light and cheap studio space. Some, such as painter and sculptor Michael Lee McCollum, who has lived in Las Vegas for two decades, say they draw inspiration from the gaudiness of the Strip. “It still knocks me dead,” said McCollum, interim dean of UNLV’s fast-growing year-old College of Fine and Performing Arts.

Others, like ceramic artist Deborah Masuoka, who opened a gallery with her husband last year, say their surroundings have the opposite effect. Masuoka makes haunting clay rabbit heads, some of them six feet tall, that appear to have been carved out of desert rock. “I think I try to compensate for the glitz,” she said.

Art critic Dave Hickey, who taught at UNLV last year and plans to return there next fall, is excited about the area’s potential for developing a vibrant art scene. “It’s a great improvisational culture. . . ,” he said of Las Vegas. “There are no critics, no beautification board, no museum.”

Hickey believes this wide-open attitude could turn Las Vegas into another SoHo, despite the seeming incongruity of the environment. “The enemies of an art scene never have to do with vulgarity,” he said. “They have to do with entrenched ideas about taste.”

So eager are officials and community leaders to promote local artists that their works cover walls in libraries and other public buildings, including McCarran Airport, where travelers waiting for their baggage can choose between playing the slot machines or looking at paintings. Outside the airport is a striking, multicolored fiberglass sculpture of a vaquero astride a bucking horse by New Mexican artist Luis Jimenez.

On a recent weekend, a visitor sampling Las Vegas high culture scurried around with a crowded itinerary that included not only the Waverly Consort performance but also a play about the Hollywood blacklist, a morning of gallery hopping, a rehearsal of the Las Vegas symphony and an afternoon of spirited modern dance set to works ranging from Vivaldi to M. C. Hammer.

As many Western cities experience hard times, Las Vegas is booming. The population of Clark County has doubled in the last decade to 741,000, and until the recession struck, the area was welcoming upward of 4,500 new residents a month, many of them either retirees or people drawn by the recent push to diversify the Las Vegas economy.

Low real estate prices and the absence of state income and corporate taxes have helped attract such companies as Citicorp., which recently moved its billing operation to Las Vegas.

“When CEOs come here, they ask, ‘What is the quality of life going to be for me and my family and my employees?’ ” said Roger Thomas, a board member of Nevada Alliance for the Arts, an arts advocacy group. “Good culture is part of their concern.”

Increasingly, these executives are flocking to the Vanda Master series, which has a younger audience now than it did when it was launched in 1976, UNLV officials say. Recent attractions have included the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, the Sofia (Bulgaria) Philharmonic Orchestra and the chamber music group, the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The stars of the Bolshoi Ballet and pianist Emanuel Ax will appear next season.

With 1,000 subscribers, the series has become something of a tradition. Yet classical artists are occasionally taken aback by an invitation to perform in what seems at first an unlikely setting. “When we were invited to play, I thought, ‘This is odd,’ ” said Michael Jaffee, a lute player who directs the Waverly Consort. “I wondered whether (the audience) would wander in and say, ‘What is this?’

But no less a figure than Isaac Stern has described Las Vegas audiences as “aware, informed and willing to be moved.” University officials are proud of a letter they received in 1980 from the violinist, praising the “warm and vibrant” acoustics of the 1,800-seat Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall. (Stern is scheduled for a return engagement next January.)

The area’s rapid growth has led to a tripling of the UNLV student body and a demand for a beefed-up arts curriculum, which now includes masters programs in playwrighting, musical theater performance and theater design and technology. With a stronger commitment to the arts, the university can now attract such talent as Robert Brewer, a veteran professional director who was lured from New York to run the fledgling musical theater program.

“I spent two days in Las Vegas 10 years ago, and I remember my wife saying, ‘Who would ever want to live here?’ ” Brewer, who has taught at Juilliard and served as artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, recalled with a smile.

Arts organizations say the vast proportion of their audience consists of local residents, although they hope to eventually attract spouses of conventioneers, visitors taking a break from gambling or guests of one of the four new major hotels that do not have casinos. Still, Richard M. Romito, the energetic director of UNLV’s performing arts center, estimates that the three stages on campus draw only about 0.5% of the tourist crowd.

“We don’t kid ourselves that we are competition for the big tourist hotels,” said Romito, who functions as UNLV’s impresario.

Nor is it possible to compete with basketball. Romito estimates that more than 200 of the Vanda series’ subscribers missed the Waverly Consort in order to watch the Rebels play in a televised Big West Conference semifinal game.

Despite evidence to the contrary, many hotel and casino operators see high culture as a distraction, if not a threat, according to local arts promoters. Last session, gaming interests helped block a bill in the state Legislature that would have increased the room tax by 0.5% to boost financing of the arts, said John Smith, past president of the Nevada Alliance for the Arts.

Hotel managers, however, deny that they are worried about losing casino patrons to such activities as the symphony. “The arts programs provide a better living environment for the people who live here. . . ,” said Tom Bruny, spokesman for Bally’s Casino Resort. “We don’t view them as any kind of threat at all.”

Strong financial support for individual arts organizations has come from some hotel operators, including Stephen and Elaine Wynn, of the Mirage and the Golden Nugget, as well as such developers as Steven Molasky. In a state that ranks 53rd out of the 56 states and U.S. territories in subsidies of the arts, the need for private monies is especially critical. Currently the state spends only 31 cents per capita on direct arts financing (less than one-third of the national average), although Gov. Bob Miller has proposed to increase support by 26%.

The death of the room-tax measure dashed hopes for state financing of a contemporary art museum. Private fund raising has begun, but it is likely to be years before such a facility gets built, said Jerry A. Schefcik, interim director of the Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, an organization aimed at generating excitement about visual art.

Meanwhile, a gallery scene that used to be limited to highly commercial spaces of the type found in suburban shopping malls is beginning to show signs of sophistication. The new galleries run the gamut from the artsy Mark Masuoka Gallery to the more commercial Markus Gallery, which seeks to cater to newly arriving corporations. Markus owner Mark G. Tratos represents an eclectic group of artists, from abstract painter and sculptor Rita Deanin Abbey, who was once married to the late writer Edward Abbey, to performance artist Denny Dent, who paints portraits in 10 minutes and has opened for Julio Iglesias.

“Art’s got to be fun in this town,” Tratos said. “If it’s not fun, you can’t compete.”

Tratos hopes the city will one day have the kind of cultural attraction one might expect to find there--a museum devoted entirely to neon. To that end, the Allied Arts Council of Southern Nevada, an arts-support group, has been warehousing old signs as hotel owners tear them down.

In the upscale Green Valley section of Las Vegas, Daniel and Robin Greenspun--he is the son of the late Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun--run the elegant Moira James Gallery alongside a bookstore and cafe that would blend in well in Berkeley.

Daniel Greenspun said that he was disappointed when visitors to a show he held last summer failed to snap up prints by the likes of David Hockney and Frank Stella. Local art collectors are accustomed to traveling to Los Angeles and San Francisco to buy art, he said, adding, “There is a stigma about things you can get in Las Vegas.”

But that is changing, in Greenspun’s view. “My children won’t have to grow up with that kind of inferiority complex,” he said.

Amid all the optimism, there is some cause for concern. Las Vegas used to be a mecca for classical musicians, who could earn a good living performing on the Strip while playing in local orchestras for minimal wages.

But a 7 1/2-month strike by the Musicians Union ended last year with the hotels’ winning unrestricted power to replace musicians with taped music. Soon after, an estimated 19% of the musicians left town and those who remained have mainly been forced into other occupations, according to Jerome Horowitz, former classical music reviewer for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Horowitz said the principal victim has been the 65-member Las Vegas Symphony, which has only 42 string players when it needs at least 60 to play Mahler and Tchaikovsky.

Said Virko Baley, the symphony’s conductor since 1980: “That presented us with a problem, but no bigger problem than Iowa City or Tucson. We lost the edge we had.” Baley has attracted national attention--but has turned off some local traditionalists--by performing modern pieces from his native Ukraine.

Adding to the symphony’s woes, Horowitz said, is the community’s unwillingness to provide adequate support. The annual budget of $500,000 for the 12-concert season is paltry when compared to that of such smaller cities as Wichita and Spokane, Horowitz complained.

The shortage of musicians has also affected the Nevada Opera Theatre, which mounts two productions a year. General director Eileen Hayes is accustomed to importing singers for lead roles, as she did for this month’s production of “Tosca.” But until now, she has never had to seek out musicians, she said, anticipating she would need to find two French horn players and a harpist.

Over the years, lavish floor shows on the Strip have also made Las Vegas a magnet for dancers, with the result that the Nevada Dance Theatre enjoys considerable cachet both inside the state and elsewhere. Now consisting of 24 dancers, the company has performed in 160 cities and has a repertoire of 85 classical and contemporary ballets.

The big production numbers are dwindling, however. Bally’s has streamlined its Jubilee! show, and in February, the Lido de Paris show at the Stardust Hotel went permanently dark. Patrick Gaffey, executive director of the Allied Arts Council, worries that the de-emphasis on shows with large chorus lines may cause an exodus of dancers.

Noting that the 1980 Census showed that Nevada employed more artists than any state but New York, Gaffey said the new figures are likely to tell a different story because of the changes in dance and music. “There’s a good chance we’re slipping,” he said.

But overall, Gaffey and other observers are betting on the long-term success of the Las Vegas arts scene.

“My view is that art is about risk and spectacle,” said art critic Hickey. “And Vegas is about that, too.”