I'm a sucker for Vegas. In six visits to this parched, neon-lit Nevada desert town in the last seven years, I've never dropped a quarter in a single slot machine or sat down at a roulette table. But as someone who loves show business and the business of shows, there's nowhere quite like it in the known universe. The entire place is theatre – a living playground of sensational excess and 24-hour pleasures, both corporeal and mental, and that's before you even get to the line-up of 70-plus shows that are playing here at any one time.
And though you may not find Pinter or Hare on the Vegas strip, most other forms of theatrical spectacle are here, from an inevitable clutch of Broadway and West End shows (from Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys to The Phantom of the Opera, the latter re-made in an abbreviated version that actually improves on the original) to a seemingly endless parade of Cirque du Soleil spectacles.
As the veteran comedian Rita Rudner – a Vegas fixture who has had a permanent residency here since 2001 – puts it in her show at Harrah's: "The place has got classier – they now have their own ballet company. They're topless, but it is a ballet company."
Actually, the Nevada Ballet Company are for real – but if it's strippers you want, there's plenty of those (of both sexes) on "the Strip", as the main drag is referred to. (And there's plenty of drag, too). No wonder it's an oft-quoted statement that "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas". But this license to misbehave in Vegas is one which many of the shows indulge in also.
There are shows here the like of which you can see nowhere else on the planet. Cirque du Soleil (CdS) may have created a generic brand of globalised spectacle that is not to everyone's taste, but the six shows that they now have in permanent residence there are both quite unlike each other and don't tour anywhere else.
I seriously think that O, CdS's water-based show at the Bellagio, is probably the greatest show I have ever seen, anywhere, combining an awe-inspiring theatrical artistry with physical feats of diving and aerial daring that is downright thrilling. Close behind is the company's Robert Lepage-directed Ka, a futuristic Blade Runner-inspired show that redefines notions of stage space completely, and Love, CdS's superb living animation of a Beatles soundtrack that comes complete with individual sound speakers in every single seat.
Vegas, of course, has always been known for its headliners, such as Bette Midler who last year began what it is expected to be a two-year run of regular appearances in the massive Colosseum at Caesars Palace, alternating seasons with Elton John and Cher: "Does it get any gayer?", Midler asks.
It is a distinctly middle-aged, middle American crowd who flock to see the Divine Miss M - and at these prices, maybe it has to be: the top price is $250, for a show that lasts 90 minutes. She delivers full value, though, and possesses a tireless comic energy that never lets up for a second as we meet her alter egos, including the outrageous Soph and the immortal Dolores DeLago, a mermaid in a motorised wheelchair.
It is worth going to Vegas for Midler alone. And her one-time pianist at the Continental Baths in New York, Barry Manilow, is also in regular residence at the Las Vegas Hilton. He may be heading to London's 02 Arena in December, but to see him in Vegas is to see him in his natural habitat.
