What’s the greatest street in the world for seeing a show? In London, the theatres are spread all round the West End, so you’d have to say New York’s Broadway, right?
In fact, you’d be about as right as Jeremy Corbyn.
There are currently 26 shows on Broadway, according to Playbill, and 24 in the West End, according to What’s On Stage. Whereas on Las Vegas’s Strip alone – yes, on one single street – there are 44, ranging from comedy, to musicals, to spectacular acrobatic acts in purpose-built venues.
If you find the choice bewildering, one way to narrow it down is to visit one of the 10 Tix4Tonight booths on and around the Strip, and choose whatever is on offer that day. You’ll save 25%-50% on the ticket price.
But really, the problem is not what to see – all the shows are of an impressively high standard, so you can hardly go wrong – but how to fit it all in. Even when you do three in one day …
The magician: Mat Franco
My show day started at The LINQ, at 4pm. Las Vegas has long been associated with magic and illusion – David Copperfield made his debut here in the 80s and has performed at MGM Grand for 16 years straight – but still has room for new blood. Mat Franco comes to the Strip as the only magician to win America’s Got Talent, although he first performed in Las Vegas aged 15 as one of the “stars of tomorrow”.
Mat plays on that in his Magic Reinvented Nightly show, displaying footage of his childhood attempts at illusion on a giant screen behind him. “That kid is always with me,” he tells the audience. “That kid who taught me to believe in magic, who convinced me it was my mission to share it.” It’s a little bit sentimental, but affecting, since you can tell it’s sincere.
“When I was a kid,” he continues, “I passed on Disneyland, and begged my parents to take me to Vegas, because I watched all the magicians on TV, and that’s where they were filmed doing all their acts.”
Franco begins with a routine in which he changes an audience member’s $100 bill into a dollar and continues through a number of impressive card tricks to a mind-blowing routine with a broken iPhone that I don’t want to spoil by giving away too much.
But the showstopper is a routine in which he makes cards appear in his hand out of thin air, on and on, each time more magical and unbelievable than the last, adding a final Las Vegas twist by throwing them above his head, only to see them disappear and then reappear on the giant video screen. It’s fluid and graceful, at once jaw-droppingly amazing and heart-stoppingly beautiful, and I have no idea how he does it.
The hip-hop dance troupe: Jabbawockeez
By 7pm, I’m ready for more, down at the MGM Grand. There’s a different kind of crowd here: young, lively, with many more black faces in the audience. A free drink and a bag of popcorn are included in the ticket price, and the mood is festive – especially after a member of the dance troupe starts interacting with the audience dressed as a comedy policeman, taking selfies and playing pranks for a good quarter of an hour before the show begins.
Like Mat Franco, Jabbawockeez also first found fame on TV, as winners of the first season of America’s Best Dance Crew in 2008; they made their Las Vegas debut in 2010. They wear white masks, which reinforces the idea that the group is stronger than any individual and gives the routines a surreal air. In the many comic moments, you’re reminded of the physicality of the great silent film stars such as Buster Keaton.
The music is a riotous mash-up of genres, throwing remixes of An Englishman in New York and Bohemian Rhapsody in with hip-hop. The dancers have mad skills – handstand dancing, dizzying spins, sliding across the floor, doing the splits – but it’s the tightness of the group choreography that most impresses. That, and the humour: a lot of audience participation is involved.
Add to that an extraordinary digital backdrop of computer-generated visuals that at key moments spill right off the screen and cover the walls, and you leave walking on air.
Circus cabaret with a rude twist: Absinthe
After a bite to eat, I’m ready for more: the 11pm performance of Absinthe, in a wooden Spiegeltent outside Caesars Palace. As befits a late-night show, this mixes top-notch circus talent with rude and raucous fun.
All the performances take place on a two and a half metre-wide stage right in the middle of the tent, with the audience seated in the round. The first act sits sipping absinthe before standing atop the table and building a tall, teetering ladder of chairs for himself, even as he climbs up them. It looks physically impossible, yet somehow he reaches the roof – at which point the “green fairy” sails down on a rope.
La fée verte (green fairy) was the 19-century nickname for absinthe, a liquor of hallucinogenic strength beloved of writers and artists (you might say that absinthe makes the art grow fonder). This particular aerial personification of the drink is singing Slice of Heaven while disrobing slowly down to her pasties.
And that’s just the first 10 minutes. Jaw-dropping acts include Brother Billy and Sister Graham, who, wearing religious habits for no reason other than “why not?”, perform a wild roller-skating routine rendered insanely difficult by the tiny stage; two muscular men who balance on each other to form extraordinary sculptural shapes; a trio of ball-jugglers; and an acrobatic routine performed entirely in a bath.
In between each death-defying act, there’s more rudeness from compere the Gazillionaire and his glamorous comedy sidekick Wendy Widdles, who is prone to reciting erotic fantasies so surreal and baroque they would bring a blush to the cheeks of Hieronymus Bosch.
What a night! And we’re still just getting started … See here for a list of the top 20 Las Vegas shows.
