Keeping it real in the city of glitz

Las Vegas

I was stalking entertainment on the Strip. By entertainment I don’t mean the strip clubs or the topless revues or even the sight of a family of six, dazed and fatigued, standing on a people mover into the Forum Shops at Caesars, like an alien abduction happening in slow motion.

I mean the big shows, the tourist shows, the shows that pass for the best the Strip has to offer -- Cirque du Soleil’s “O,” Blue Man Group, Clint Holmes, Danny Gans, Wayne Newton, Siegfried & Roy. The shows that are built, on the one hand, to wow Middle America and timed, on the other, to provide compulsive gamblers with a place to go for an hour or 90 minutes, sharp.

The week I was in Vegas, the Cirque show “Mystere” at Treasure Island was dark. Penn & Teller had yet to commence a two-year run at the Rio. Tom Jones was in town, which is never good for the faint of heart. Darren Romeo, a singing illusionist (“He puts the music in magic and the magic in music!”) was opening an afternoon show in the Siegfried & Roy Theatre, produced by Siegfried & Roy. There was a press opening, which brought out Monti Rock III; he handed me his card, which was hot pink and read “Piece of the Rock, Publicist to the Stars.” He was wearing a lot of leopard print and holding a stuffed cat.

Wherefore art thou, Romeo, these days? His show has already closed. Poof. Vegas, after all, isn’t that easy. Oh sure, the Rolling Stones can pull in for a night at the Hard Rock, but could Mick Jagger last a decade-plus, six nights a week, on the Strip?

Meanwhile, over at the MGM Grand, Rick Springfield and “EFX Alive!” will soon be toast, to be replaced by another Cirque show. The MGM people (MGM Mirage Inc. has a monopoly of the big Vegas hotels) wanted me to check out the Amazing Jonathan, the gross-out magician who performs at the Golden Nugget downtown. He packs the house! they kept saying. Downtown! I kept seeing him on an in-room channel at the Mirage, seeming to saw his arm off.

Magicians, I am sad to report, are somewhat lost on me. So I went to see Wayne Newton. Sure, you could mock him as a relic, but have you seen him turn a cover of “Suspicious Minds” into a 20-minute free-floating exercise in Clintonian community relations? Have you seen the way Medicare-eligible women throw their arms around him and go in for the kiss, mouths first?

Newton shook my hand during this furious, preacher-like tour of his showroom and his cologne was on my palm for hours. This was entertainment so real you could smell it, and as I sniffed my hand it hit me -- this is why you see a show in Vegas, despite the prices. You go to be dazzled, to see entertainers live and in the raw and putting the show back in show business.

You go, in short, to smell Wayne Newton on your hand.

Nowadays, you can go whenever you want, quickly and conveniently, as a proliferation of flights have turned Vegas into a virtual Southern California suburb, an easier weekend getaway than fighting traffic out of town (every day, there are some 75 scheduled flights leaving Los Angeles for Las Vegas, if you include the four airports in the area -- Los Angeles International, Burbank, John Wayne and Ontario International).

Hipsters like to go to the Strip with a sense of irony. They catch Siegfried & Roy as a meta-experience, an affirmation of their own evolved sense of humor.

But this, it seems to me, defeats the purpose of seeing a Vegas show in the first place. If you want to be smug, stay at home and watch HBO. The TV and movie industries love to dress up their low- and middle-brow entertainments as high culture. They phony up the gravitas with phrases like “from the creators of ‘Will & Grace.’ ” Vegas is the opposite of this. Its hype doesn’t insult you. Vegas is not from the creators of “Will & Grace.”

Vegas is Sonny King and Blackie Hunt on a Friday night at the Bootlegger Bistro, which is not on the Strip. The Bootlegger’s in a mini-mall next to a Thai restaurant and not so far from a mattress store. It is owned by Lorraine Hunt, the lieutenant governor of Nevada. I had been told to show up on a Friday or Saturday, between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. I walked into a time warp. Sonny King played the Sands in the 1950s. He sings, he emcees, he plugs the Bootlegger’s veal special. His partner, Blackie Hunt, the husband of Lorraine Hunt, plays the melodica; he used to be part of a Vegas act called the Characters. After midnight, Sonny and Blackie turn the stage over to whoever wants to perform. The night I was there, Nancy Goode, a local singer, yodeled, but only after singing “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” (she was good at both). Buddy Greco, who has 65 records to his name, introduced a jazz standard while shushing a table of loud bikers who seemed to have wandered into the wrong movie. Over by the bar, Lorraine Hunt said: “I’ve just been in Washington, dealing with homeland security.” It was way past midnight. That was when King went up to Lorraine Hunt and, because no segue was needed, said: “Lorraine, your hairdresser wants to sing.”

I was positive that the music at Bootlegger’s was live, though the same evidently can’t be said of other shows. In a nod to the Disney-fication of Vegas entertainment, some shows boost their sound with pre-recorded music; a recent column in the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal noted that “Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance,” which closed recently at New York-New York, “was ‘augmented’ by the recorded stomps of Irish step-dancing, the Strip’s first case of Highland fling-syncing.”

Musicians on the Strip lament the cost-cutting measures that have made the “house orchestra” an anachronism, as hotel entertainment has become less a source of artistic pride than an economic widget. The philosophy behind this is simple: Big production shows are in vogue, and audiences evidently don’t care where the music is coming from, as long as they can buy their T-shirts and hats to commemorate the event.

“We really don’t have any shows worth over $50,” says a cabby taking me to the Flamingo Hilton. There, Gladys Knight has resurfaced in a show that involves her hits. But only one Pip.

Tickets to see Knight cost $55 and $65. Blue Man Group, the blue-faced men who do pop-arty things with ordinary commercial objects like a Twinkie, charge $69.50 and $79.50. “O,” the circus on water at Bellagio, costs $100 to $121. Siegfried & Roy: a C-note. Next year, pop diva Celine Dion will up the ante when she joins forces with Franco Dragone, the Italian-born circus genius. Celine-meets-Cirque debuts in the spring, in a new 4,000-seat theater at Caesars Palace. Tickets are $150, $127.50 and $87.50.

Maybe it’s as simple as this: People come to Vegas to be entertained, and Vegas exists to entertain and to gouge them. It is a very simple transaction -- pleasing, in fact, for this very simplicity. L.A. comedian Patton Oswalt, a regular Vegas visitor, sums up the mind-set of the typical Strip customer this way: “The plant could close, the kid could turn out gay. I want 48 hours where I literally do not have to think about anything. The patrons are very up front about it, and so is the city.”

Gambling, of course, is still the engine, but people on the Strip are full of statistics about how non-gaming activities -- entertainment in all its various permutations -- have made Vegas a playground for the middle class, and memories are never more than a souvenir away.

“The growth came in entertainment, and the evidence of the change was everywhere,” writes Hal Rothman, history professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, in his new book, “Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the 21st Century” (Routledge, 2002). Rothman’s list includes “the gradual upward creep in the price of buffet meals and rooms, the proliferation of brand-name souvenir shops and the new shopping conglomerations like Desert Passage at the Aladdin, the ever-expanding number of stunning one-of-a-kind restaurants and the upscale restaurant chains that follow in their wake, the new arenas hosting never-ending music and shows and the escalating prices of tickets to shows and concerts. Vegas still offers what it always has, a luxury experience at a middle-class price.”

It seemed rude, finally, that I had been to Vegas so many times without seeing Wayne Newton or Siegfried & Roy.

Before my trip, I sought out an expert in all things Vegas, Penn Jillette, the speaking half of the bizarre magic act Penn & Teller. After living in New York for many years, through off-Broadway and Broadway runs, after making a movie, after resurfacing on television with a show called “Sin City Spectacular,” based on the Strip, the two have come to live in Las Vegas year-round. The land is cheap, the airport links them nonstop to most places around the country and Vegas seemed like a good place to die, Jillette said. That, and the tax rate is low. You can see Penn & Teller at the Rio for at least the next two years.

Jillette talked of going to see Vegas shows in the late ‘80s and of being brought to his knees when he saw Dean Martin live. “The great thing was, he was the Ramones,” Jillette said. Later, he elaborated: Just as the Ramones took the idea of faster and louder and pushed it to such an extreme that it became its own artistic expression, so too did Martin push the idea of cool and relaxed toward an end in itself.

From there, it seemed a comedown to talk about Siegfried & Roy. “It’s a fey tractor pull,” Jillette said. “I like them.”

There is, indeed, something endearingly incomprehensible about the show. There are lots of people onstage in fantastical costumes and bombastic set pieces that include a fire-breathing dragon. A good-versus-evil scenario is enacted; it helps to know that the show’s designer also designed “Cats.” Siegfried & Roy appear, disappear, reappear. Tigers appear and disappear, though not with the same frequency as Siegfried & Roy. Later, my notes read: “Tigers appear out of a liquid sky to protect and serve our precious wildlife.” I have no idea what this means. My notes also say, “Velcome, Albuquerque,” an apparent reference to some of Siegfried’s banter with the front row.

True to Jillette’s analogy, the show was as confounding as watching two-wheelers haul heavy loads in the mud. Is it worth seeing? Attempting to answer that question raises its own set of questions. Yes and no. And yes again.

“Las Vegas has not identified a paradigm within which all of its shows can be judged,” said Allan Feldman, senior vice present of MGM Mirage.

Feldman’s comment proved a handy mantra over a dizzying nine shows in eight nights, as I went from Blue Man Group at the Luxor (they bang drums full of paint and project marshmallows onto a canvas, thus creating art) to the Harrah’s Clint Holmes, an affable singer-entertainer gaining popularity, to Rita Rudner, who performs her stand-up comedy at New York-New York, under the occasional rumble of the roller coaster overhead, to “O,” the spectacle on water.

There is no paradigm. There is no paradigm.

And then there is Wayne Newton. He comes out to the strains of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” as a guy dressed in a spacesuit rises from beneath ground and then gives way to Newton, in his tuxedo. He is introduced as Mr. Excitement, as the Midnight Idol, as the King of Las Vegas.

Newton’s voice is shot, you can’t always understand what he’s singing, but then he turns “Suspicious Minds” into that 20-minute tour de force. He gets champagne for couples celebrating anniversaries, he talks about his travels as the newly named chairman of the USO Celebrity Circle.

There was the sign he saw on one of his military tour stops: “It is God’s responsibility to forgive Bin Laden. It is our responsibility to arrange the meeting.” Then he had all the veterans in the audience stand and to be acknowledged.

He sweats. He tells the crowd how hot they are. He does a medley of stuff: “Danke Schoen,” “Unchained Melody,” whatever. His hair never moves. He’s up there almost two hours. His bow tie is askew. He is Wayne.

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The headliners

Siegfried & Roy

Where: The Mirage, 3400 Las Vegas Blvd. S., (702) 792-7780

When: Fridays through Tuesdays

Price: $105.50

*

Blue Man Group

Where: Luxor, 3900 Las Vegas Blvd. S., (800) BLU-EMAN

When: Nightly

Price: $69.50 and $79.50

*

“O”

Where: Bellagio, 3600 Las Vegas Blvd. S., (888) 488-7111

When: Fridays though Tuesdays

Price: $121; obstructed view, $90

*

“Mystere”

Where: Treasure Island, 3300 Las Vegas Blvd. S., (800) 392-1999

When: Wednesdays through Sundays

Price: $88

*

Wayne Newton

Where: Stardust, 3000 Las Vegas Blvd. S., (702) 732-6111

When: Nightly except Fridays

Price: $65.20

*

Danny Gans

Where: The Mirage, 3400 Las Vegas Blvd. S., (702) 792-7777

When: Saturdays, Sundays, Tuesdays through Thursdays

Price: $100, $80

*

Clint Holmes

Where: Harrah’s, 3475 Las Vegas Blvd. S., (702) 369-5111

When: Mondays through Saturdays

Price: $59.95

*

Penn & Teller

Where: Rio, 3700 W. Flamingo Road, (888) 746-7784

When: Mondays, Wednesdays through Sundays

Price: $65