The Playhouse in the Desert

Every 90 minutes in front of Treasure Island resort and casino, a merry band of leaping, laughing, lip-syncing pirates hits the deck of the good ship Hispaniola.

“The Buccaneer Bay Show” isn’t long on narrative, but here’s what happens: The pirates point their cannons at the HMS Britannia, a few hundred yards to the north. Kaboom--flames, pirates and Brits plunge into the water. The Britannia sinks. The Brits lose every time. In basketball terms, they’re the Washington Generals, eternally outplayed by the Harlem Globetrotters.

This is theater in Las Vegas.

Due south on Las Vegas Boulevard, in front of the $1.6-billion Bellagio hotel, the dancing-waters extravaganza “The Fountains at Bellagio” repeats every 15 or 30 minutes, depending on the time of day. Like “The Buccaneer Bay Show,” the synchronized spritzing cost about $33 million to open, plus another $6 million annually to operate. On this Saturday the geysers skyrocket and sway to the tune of “One” from the Broadway classic “A Chorus Line.” Ooo! Sigh! Give her your attention! The crowd complies.

This, too, is theater in Las Vegas.

In a city of 120,294 hotel rooms and an equal number of all-you-can-eat buffet items, distinctions between “real” theater and “fake” theater coalesce amid the jangle and whir of the casinos.

Is such a city, for decades known as the home of the 6-foot showgirl in replicate, prepared for “Blue Man Group,” an unlikely (and very funny) off-Broadway franchise featuring three shiny blue techno-aliens and a lot of percussion, opening officially Tuesday at the Luxor hotel?

Can the Gallic musical-theater spectacle “Notre Dame de Paris,” a Euro-popped version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” find a niche for itself at the Paris Las Vegas hotel, where it opened in January?

If the answer is yes to either question, then the elastic notion of Las Vegas theater--theater in a city that is theater--may be in for another stretch.

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Las Vegas theater redefined itself rather suddenly in 1993, when Cirque du Soleil opened a permanent (or “sit-down”) production at Treasure Island. “Mystere” disarmed the city with a new sort of show biz: circus, plus theater, plus class.

Its popular success led to a second Cirque production, “O.” Since 1998, Cirque’s incomparable aquacade has serenely gone about its business inside the Bellagio, a $92-million production in a $100-million auditorium, built around a shape-shifting 1.5-million-gallon onstage water tank. Such expenditures may not be equaled any time soon, especially since Mirage Resorts Inc. (Bellagio’s parent company) agreed to be acquired last week by MGM Grand Inc. in a $4.4-billion deal.

For now, and likely for years to come, “O” represents a pinnacle of New Vegas showmanship. It is Vegas-specific, yet it takes you someplace else, to a water planet like our own, but not like our own. It’s a deservedly tough ticket--$110 on the high end, the highest on the Strip. It’s beautiful enough to make you cry, all the way back to the blackjack table.

In one sense “O” stands alone; in another, in the year of Our Lord of the Dance 2000, it’s just one more theatrical brand name for the taking. “Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance” plays eight shows weekly at New York New York Hotel & Casino. “Forever Plaid” continues an open-ended run at the Flamingo Hilton, its casino lobby cards heralding a show “direct from Broadway!” (That sounds better than the truth, which is “originally staged in an off-Broadway cabaret on the Upper West Side!”)

The Strip has welcomed actual Broadway exports, too, and not just the limited runs of “Buddy” (concluding earlier this month at the Las Vegas Hilton) and the oldies revue “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” Wednesday-March 29 at Caesars Palace.

“Remember when Broadway was Broadway?” That’s how the Mandalay Bay production of the musical “Chicago” touted itself. Titles such as “Cabaret” and “Annie Get Your Gun” have been floated, though a replacement for the departed “Chicago” has yet to be announced.

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Broadway has long been a part of this city’s theatrical identity. These “tab” versions of proven shows played the hotels, cut down to a 90-minute running time. Two a night. In and out, and back to the tables.

The recent full-length “Chicago” didn’t do gangbusters business; if it had, it’d still be razzle-dazzling ‘em (it closed Feb. 27). The nearly yearlong run of that Bob Fosse slinker did, however, prove that “normal folk”--as one Vegas columnist wrote--could “sit still and even enjoy a theatrical evening that lasted 2 1/2 hours, intermission included.”

Remarkably, normal folk in Boston, Chicago and New York have taken the 90-minute off-Broadway novelty “Blue Man Group” to their hearts. “Blue Man Group: Live at Luxor,” currently in previews, may approximate the classic Old Vegas running time. But it’s not “Forever Plaid.” In a city testing its theatrical boundaries, this is the most tantalizing boundary-pusher afoot.

Created by Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink, “Blue Man Group” should be cherished in its Vegas context, if only for its natural, immediate and hilarious contrast to everything else.

Our hosts are three alien-like beings, bald and blue and shiny (played by various actors in rotation), backed by seven musicians. The cobalt trio itself relies on nontraditional percussion instruments, including PVC pipes. It’s a genre unto itself: Home Depot performance art.

The Luxor’s “Blue Man Group” is de-luxer than its long-running editions in New York, Boston and Chicago. It is playing a venue three times the size of any other “Blue Man Group.” Additional scenic and musical elements have been added to fill out the wide Luxor showroom stage and its 1,200-seat auditorium. The results, rather amazingly, feel right. The show is silly and stirring, full of low-tech wonderments and spattered paint. (It spatters when poured onto a drummer’s drum; the effect is quite mysterious.)

The Luxor may only be able to do so much to sell the show to old-schoolers, but if unsuspecting theatergoers take “Blue Man Group” for what it is--a postmodern vaudeville routine, Ernie Kovacs’ old Nairobi Trio act brought up to date--they’ll probably find it a gas.

“Notre Dame de Paris” is not a gas, alas. It is portentous business, unfolding all across the soccer-field-size stage of Le Thea^tre des Arts, located at the far end of the Paris Las Vegas casino, near Les Toilettes and Les Telephones.

The hotel and the show’s producers are banking on “Notre Dame de Paris” as a prospective long-running tenant. A hit in Paris and across Canada, the show made its English-language debut here in January, in an abridged, Vegas-friendly 100-minute form. (A longer English-language version opens in June in London.)

Director Gilles Maheu, artistic director of Montreal’s superb Carbone 14 troupe, stages the material as well as possible. In this abridged edition, Victor Hugo’s story is hinted at here and there and then thrust aside. The show is a bouncer, treating Hugo like a pesky drunk.

Composer Richard Cocciante and author-lyricist Luc Palmondon work in a highly segmented music-video mode. We’re in a past that looks like the present, rife with break-dancers, riot-control fences, fabulous hair. The story of the bell man, his guardian devil Frollo and the hot gypsy temptress Esmerelda comes at us via the English lyrics of Will Jennings, co-author of the “Titanic” theme “My Heart Will Go On.” He goes on and on and on, with phrases like “When I’m in his soldier’s arms/I want to run/But he’s too warm,” or “God, you made the world all wrong/I’m so ugly, she’s so fine.” And if there’s one Vegas tradition not worth following, it’s the dubious practice of watching a multimillion-dollar production unfold to the accompaniment of a prerecorded, synthesized orchestra. Fifteenth century karaoke, anyone?

That certain karaoke feeling returns during “EFX,” now in its fifth year at the MGM Grand Hotel. With this nutty enterprise, it matters less. In its delirious, we’ll-try-anything way, it links Old Vegas (a headliner, plus many, many, many costumes) with New Vegas.

Tommy Tune’s the headliner, recently passing the 500-performance mark. “EFX” has your interests at heart: It spares you the trouble of seeing any other show on the Strip, by consciously sampling bits and pieces of practically everything else out there. It most resembles the other show featuring a flame-spewing mechanical dragon: Siegfried & Roy at the Mirage.

It’s amazing Tune manages to be noticed at all, what with the lasers! The Flying by Foy flying rigs! Warlocks from “The Time Machine”! Fire, smoke, a “Sword in the Stone” routine and the disembodied head of Mr. James Earl Jones as “The EFX Master”! Not since Laurence Olivier appeared as Lord of the Universe in a London show called “Time” has such a voice of authority lent itself to such a glorious cheese ball of a show. The day this glorious cheese ball of a city can’t accommodate a show like “EFX” will be a dark day indeed.

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New Vegas has worked something of a miracle. In 10 years it has nearly doubled its hotel capacity, gone upscale and gone consciously, even stridently international--without losing an ounce of its innate American crassness. The same goes for the theater scene, stretching and bending with the times.

The crassness of “O” has only to do with money. Any production costing nearly $200 million had a decent shot at being something--to look at, at least. But there’s nothing crass about this show’s Magritte-like surreal wonders, its world-beat music, its acrobats performing over water. Emerging from this universe you feel dazed, sated and--blessedly--not pummeled. You can’t quite believe something this good happened in a city not known for good taste.

“Notre Dame de Paris” represents something new to Vegas as well. It is a proven hit elsewhere; it has a familiar story to tell; it is imposing; and it has an avant sheen. It is everything, in fact, except good. It’s something old and something new, but its materials are strictly borrowed.

“Blue Man Group” would’ve been inconceivable even five years ago. It’s a strange irony that, while “Notre Dame de Paris” gives voice to “the down and out,” the dispossessed and lustlorn and jaw-miked, the cobalt trio and their paint-set represent a bid for disaffected masses of another kind. It’s an all-ages diversion for anyone who’s had it with Old Vegas entertainment.

It’s a rarity: A high old time for both the tragically ironic and the irony-free. Both camps are alive and well in New Vegas. The city invests millions upon millions in stunt-show pirates and dancing waters and magic acts and, yes, in theater, theater of every tiger stripe, paving the Strip with high expectations.

If “Blue Man Group” is hip enough for the room, without being too hip, then the room--the incredible expanding showroom in the desert--isn’t what it used to be.

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* “Blue Man Group: Live at Luxor,” Luxor Las Vegas, 3900 Las Vegas Blvd. South. Sundays and Mondays, 7 p.m.; Wednesdays-Saturdays, 7 and 10 p.m. $60.50-$71.50. (800) 557-7428.

* “Notre Dame de Paris,” Paris Las Vegas, 3655 Las Vegas Blvd. South. Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. $69.50. (877) 374-7469.

* “EFX,” MGM Grand Hotel, 3799 Las Vegas Blvd. South. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. $37-$72. (800) 929-1111.

* “O,” Bellagio, 3600 Las Vegas Blvd. South. Fridays-Tuesdays, 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. $93.50-$110. (888) 488-7111.