Entertainment production company Silent House Group is not based in Las Vegas, but “Vegas has been the hotbed for us lately,” says CEO Baz Halpin. His first effort on the Las Vegas Strip was working on Cher’s concert residency at Caesars Palace, and the breakthrough of Britney Spears’ show at Planet Hollywood occurred in the early days of Silent House.
“That’s when it really felt like the floodgates started to open up,” he says. “Pop residencies just ignited.”
Halpin has produced or collaborated on many of those residencies, including shows starring Adele, Maroon 5 and Katy Perry. He also helped develop and launch Awakening at Wynn, and beyond Las Vegas, his company has expanded in both concert and live event production and transferring those experiences to TV and movies; Silent House produced the film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (in partnership with Taylor Swift Productions) and recently took home an Emmy Award for the TV special Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love.
Halpin took some precious time to discuss the evolution of Vegas entertainment with the Weekly while he continues to work on Usher’s upcoming Super Bowl LVIII halftime show at Allegiant Stadium.
What was your approach when starting out with residency shows on the Strip?
You always want to think about the audience with any type of show, and for [Las Vegas], you want to think about the audience in two categories: the fans who know the artist and the catalog and can’t wait to see this artist perform, and then there’s going to be the vacationer, the tourist, people in Las Vegas who have never seen Britney Spears before so let’s go check out Britney Spears. And we try to think about residencies being different from a concert tour where fans also go to see their favorite artist but might buy tickets months in advance. In Las Vegas, tickets are often purchased when they come into town. So we try to structure the shows so they’re focused more on the greatest hits, more catalog-based, and more conceptional rather than supporting a specific album or period of time. Katy Perry’s show Play was a much more conceptual type of show; it wasn’t tied to anything. It’s something that would be evergreen regardless of what she’s doing in her career. The other thing about Vegas is it gives you the opportunity to do things you can’t do in a touring situation. You have a theater that affords you a different sort of tools, and from the artist’s perspective, you can do something slightly more involved, challenging or technically advanced.
At this point, do you prefer to work on live stage shows or on TV and film projects?
It all centers around entertainment that is usually live or recorded as live, whether it’s for broadcast or a crossover, like the Eras film with Taylor [Swift], a live touring show that became a theatrical release. I wouldn’t say I prefer one or the other. I like the variety, that you can learn things in one discipline that you can bring over into another.
Awakening was a different project, a new version of a traditional Vegas production show. What was that process like, and how has that show evolved?
It was incredible, certainly a dream to create a Las Vegas spectacle. When I first started coming to Las Vegas, I’d go see every show I could and I was completely in awe of the feat of putting on a show like that, the ambition. The scale of it is so gargantuan compared to anything you would do in live music. Putting on a show like Awakening is no easy feat, but you want to be challenged, to have projects that will push you. When we set out to do the show at Wynn, there were a couple things we wanted to do. One was to make it the most technologically advanced show on the Strip. And we wanted to embrace all the different facets that made these spectacular [shows] in Vegas so successful, while creating something that could always evolve. At Awakening, we’ve had a lot of repeat audiences, so you want to make sure you can every so often refresh the show, add new elements, chapters or scenes.
You’ve worked on Super Bowl halftime performances already but this one in Las Vegas with Usher feels like expectations for entertainment are at another level.
Silent House has been involved in five or six halftime shows, and it’s a show for not only the 120 million people at home, but also for the 60,000 people in the stadium. Las Vegas is such an iconic city with an incredibly solid identity. Everyone in the world knows what Las Vegas is, so to have the Super Bowl here and embrace that is great. And Usher is just the consummate performer, a real professional. He’s definitely an entertainer with a capital E. He can do things no one else can and his catalog is just mind blowing. I think he has embraced the city really fully in a way not all performers who come to Las Vegas do, really sort of set a new paradigm here.
What other projects are you excited about this year?
Silent House is producing the SAG Awards on Netflix, the first live awards show on Netflix, and we’re excited about that. It’s really been a phenomenal past year for us—we were nominated for a Golden Globe, we won an Emmy, and we’ve had an amazing start to 2024 and kicking it off with the Super Bowl will be great. It’s just a great time for live entertainment in general. People always have an appetite for it, even in a world where so many people live on their phones and computers day in and day out. The live experience is a unique way for people to get together and experience something communal, a rarity these days, and sports and music seem to be the two things that encapsulate the best of that communal human spirit. And the Super Bowl is an amalgamation of that.
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