N.Y., Strip style

“They say the neon lights are bright -- on Broadway,” goes the old pop song. But “they” apparently never saw Las Vegas.

Not only are the Strip’s lights brighter than those on the Great White Way, but its marquees might soon look as if they’re actually near Times Square, judging from the Broadway-style fare that is gradually invading.

The producers of “Avenue Q” won Broadway’s Tony Award for best musical in June and then announced that their show would open its only other production in Vegas, skipping a national tour.

A few days later came word that “The Phantom of the Opera” would open a permanent production in a theater that would be carved out of the Venetian Hotel on the Strip.

Already up and running for more than a year is “Mamma Mia!” -- at its full Broadway length instead of the 90 minutes that has been the custom for most shows in Las Vegas. An open-ended run of the Broadway version of “Saturday Night Fever” is also on the Strip.

And beginning previews this week is “We Will Rock You,” a hit London musical with a score made up of Queen songs. It’s bypassing Broadway for now and going straight to Las Vegas for its U.S. premiere.

This incipient Broadway beachhead in Vegas could raise several challenges to competitors on both sides of the country. In Las Vegas itself, Broadway shows with professional but relatively unknown actors might deliver more bang for the buck to the hotels than expensive pop stars do. And Broadway musicals present an alternative to the Cirque du Soleil empire that is about to mount its fourth per- manent show in Las Vegas, with a fifth possibly waiting in the wings.

Meanwhile, in Southern California -- the largest single source of Las Vegas tourists -- certain musicals might not show up for a period of time because of exclusivity deals in the contracts for the Las Vegas versions. And the establishment of a thriving commercial theater district in Las Vegas eventually might take a small slice of business from Broadway itself.

East Coast snobs might shudder at the idea that an imitation Broadway could be born in the desert. But the reality is that for years both Broadway and the Strip have thrived primarily on tourists. Each city -- New York and Las Vegas -- drew slightly more than 35 million visitors last year. Las Vegas statisticians calculate that the average tourist spent $37.82 to see some kind of show. It’s true that most of those productions are not fonts of intellectual stimulation -- but then neither is much of what’s playing on Broadway.

A slot for ‘Q’

The most unexpected of the Broadway entries in the Vegas sweepstakes is “Avenue Q.” Featuring puppets as well as actors, it offers a topless flash -- but only on a puppet. And its themes are far removed from Vegas glitz. Its young, financially struggling characters would not be likely to vacation amid the slot machines. Sample song titles: “It Sucks to Be Me,” “If You Were Gay,” “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” “I Wish I Could Go Back to College.”

But Steve Wynn, the Vegas hotel mogul who earlier arranged for the itinerant Cirque du Soleil to park permanently in the desert and also opened the Bellagio resort with a gallery of fine art worth $300 million, saw “Avenue Q” three times in New York. He decided he wanted it as part of his new $2.5-billion Vegas resort, the Wynn Las Vegas, alongside a new water spectacle from a former Cirque du Soleil talent, Franco Dragone.

“Ten million dollars’ worth of hydraulics cannot accomplish what Marcel Marceau can do,” Wynn says, explaining his eclectic theatrical tastes. “I wanted a counterpoint, a sample of Marcel Marceau, to use a metaphor. Las Vegas has to develop theater at its core, at its most fundamental. It’s what separates us from the Indian casinos.”

“Avenue Q” co-producer Kevin McCollum says a regular tour had been planned for the show, but it posed problems. Because the costs of moving from city to city would require the greater revenue potential of huge theaters, the musical would play in venues that would overwhelm such an intimate show. And it would require extensive advertising campaigns to identify itself: Unlike other recent Tony winners “Hairspray” and “The Producers,” it’s not based on a familiar source.

The producers were miffed at requests from some of the presenters on the road for bowdlerization of the show’s lyrics as well as what McCollum felt were insufficient financial guarantees.

By contrast, Wynn offered a 1,200-seat theater -- small enough “to protect the storytelling,” McCollum says -- and no moving expenses or concerns about the show’s language. “It made sense.”

He dismisses the thought that the recent incident in which members of a Las Vegas audience booed Linda Ronstadt’s onstage endorsement of the movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” might indicate trouble for “Avenue Q,” which is edgier than most Vegas entertainments.

“Our show doesn’t preach a political agenda,” he says. True, the closing song mentions that George W. Bush is “only for now,” but it also indicates that just about everything in life is “only for now.”

One exception to that “only for now” rule might be “The Phantom of the Opera,” which has grossed $3.2 billion and has been turned into a movie with an expected release this year. Even so, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and his producing partner, Clear Channel Entertainment, are convinced that it has enough theatrical life left in it to warrant a $35-million production in a new $30-million theater at the Venetian in Vegas.

Still, the show will get a makeover. About an hour will be nipped to make it fit the usual Vegas length of 90 minutes with no intermission. With many Vegas visitors staying only two days, says Scott Zeiger, Clear Channel theatrical chief executive, “the hotels are not interested in keeping them captivated inside the theater” when casinos, restaurants, spas and shops also want to raid their wallets. Zeiger says verses and dialogue will be trimmed, as they are in the movie, but the entire story will be told.

Magnified effects will compensate for the textual losses, he says, likening the experience to “ ‘Phantom’ inside the Haunted Mansion at Disney World.”

Although details have yet to be firmed up, Zeiger suggests that trap doors throughout the 1,800-seat audience area will allow surprise Phantom appearances. A chandelier will explode, and a boat will float across a real lake.

Don’t expect a touring “Phantom” in the L.A. area for at least three years after the Vegas version opens. Because of its proximity to Nevada, California will be off limits to “Phantom” tours.

More ‘Mamma’

Taking a different tack is “Mamma Mia!,” the musical assembled from ABBA tunes, which opened at the Mandalay Bay resort in February 2003. Its producers didn’t try to contain their show in a 90-minute format, and they haven’t banned nearby tours. A “Mamma” tour came through Hollywood this year.

Nina Lannan, “Mamma’s” North American producer, says that one “Mamma Mia!” “acts as a commercial for the other ones. People want to come back as a group with other people” -- in a convention town like Las Vegas, often with co-workers. And “Mamma Mia!,” she adds, “isn’t about spectacle.” It couldn’t rely on effects to make up for a diminished playing time, so it was kept at its original length, and it plays a usual theater schedule of eight performances a week instead of the 10 that is common for most 90-minute shows in Vegas. It usually grosses at least $800,000 a week.

The new “We Will Rock You” uses the “Mamma Mia!” formula of combining a story with a pop group’s song catalog. But the hero of Ben Elton’s book is a young male rebel 300 years in the future, and the stadium-filling music of Queen means a somewhat more male-skewed appeal than that of “Mamma Mia!”

“We Will Rock You” is a creation of Tribeca Productions, better known for its movies and its co-founder, Robert De Niro. The show opened on the West End in 2002 to mostly discouraging reviews, but they didn’t seem to matter -- it’s still playing there and is spreading around the world. Producer Jane Rosenthal acknowledges that reviews matter more on Broadway than just about anywhere else, but she denies any fear of critics and says that the show will probably tour in 2006, with Broadway a possibility as well.

Bobby Yee, president of Paris Las Vegas, where “We Will Rock You” will be presented in a 1,450-seat hall with six huge plasma screens, notes that the hall’s previous Broadway-style occupant, “Notre Dame de Paris,” didn’t do well. Yee wasn’t there at the time, but the accepted explanation for its failure, he says, was its downbeat ending. Visitors to Vegas like happy endings, and “We Will Rock You” has one.

A cautionary note about the prospects for the Broadway-Las Vegas connection exists in a statistic from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. It reports that the average dollar amount spent on shows, per visitor per trip, declined from the 2001 fiscal year through the 2003 fiscal year. So did similar amounts for other Vegas activities. (Figures for the 2004 fiscal year aren’t ready.)

A spokeswoman for the bureau attributes the decline to general economic conditions that appear to be on the rebound in 2004.

High-wire act

Cirque du Soleil certainly isn’t cutting back. Its latest Vegas extravaganza, due to open at the MGM Grand before the end of the year, is rumored to cost $180 million. Michael Bolingbroke, the Cirque’s senior vice president of shows, says the final cost of the show isn’t known, but “it’s certainly an excessive amount.”

The new Cirque show “will shake the spectator’s perception of space, conception of the law of gravity and comprehension of the world in three dimensions,” according to the Cirque website. But at the same time, it might be somewhat closer to the new Broadway fare than most Cirque shows in that “it will have more of a narrative” than is customary for the Cirque, Bolingbroke says. And it’s directed by a visionary figure from cutting-edge theater, Robert Lepage, who had never worked with the Cirque until this to-be-titled show.

“The level of theater in Las Vegas is changing and improving,” Bolingbroke says.

A couple of key presenters of musicals in Los Angeles profess not to be alarmed by the rise of Las Vegas theater. Both Gordon Davidson at the Ahmanson Theatre and Martin Wiviott at the Pantages Theatre agree that “Avenue Q” wouldn’t work in their large theaters.

“Phantom” has played in both of those theaters. If it doesn’t come around for three more years, “I don’t think anyone is being robbed,” Davidson says. “Would I feel different if it were a new show that had ‘Ahmanson’ written all over it? Yes, I would be concerned.”

Wiviott says Vegas runs “may deprive local audiences of some shows.” But he adds that many musicals of the “Fiddler on the Roof” variety would not work for audiences “of gamblers and drinkers with 90-minute attention spans.”

“Avenue Q” may be the biggest test yet to see if that traditional notion of the Las Vegas audience is going to change. Wynn is convinced that it will, that the audiences for the show in Vegas will be more diverse than those for a traditional national tour.

“Las Vegas is going to become very, very edgy in the performing arts,” Wynn says. “Thank God -- it’s about time.”

Contact Don Shirley at don.shirley@latimes.com.