Music

Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran and Joss Stone added to Rock in Rio USA lineup

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Break dancers perform during a Rock in Rio news conference Monday, Oct. 27, 2014. The event was held to unveil a mock-up of Rock Street, one of three thematic streets that will be featured inside the City of Rock. The music festival venue at Las Vegas Boulevard South and Sahara Avenue will open in May of 2015.
Photo: Steve Marcus

Rock in Rio USA continued its media-savvy and systematic rollout of announcements this afternoon with a teaser event designed to hint at what the festival site—and sights—will look like during the May 8-9 and 15-16 festivals. Buried into the proceedings was the revelation of five more musical participants.

This year’s Cosmopolitan resident performer Bruno Mars and British breakout singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran will now join Taylor Swift, Metallica, Linkin Park and No Doubt on the Rock in Rio USA main stage. English soul diva Joss Stone will be worked into the collaboration-friendly Sunset Stage, which will also feature John Legend and the Deftones. A 17-member jazz/frevo band named Spok Frevo Orqustra and Bossa Cuca Nova, a Grammy-nominated band that performs its namesake genre with an accompanying DJ, are slated to perform at the Brazilian region of the festival’s City of Rock.

England and the United States will also have their own “rock streets” and stages in the City, which—per the model displayed today for journalists—will comprise the west half of the 37 acres now called the MGM Festival Grounds (formerly an RV park adjacent to Circus Circus). A variety of traditional street performers will complement the music acts in each of the three areas.

During today’s media event, the Celtic music/Brazilian dance troupe Terra Celta, the New York-style breakdancing crew Street Dance and the expressive martial art/acrobatic/dance group Batuque—among others—exhibited their talents in front of the appropriate City facades already completed (or brought over from the Brazilian and Lisbon Rock in Rio venues) and temporarily erected. The facades are meant to be easily deconstructed for other events to be held on the Festival Grounds, though infrastructure and amenities such as artificial grass, flushing toilets and underground cabling will be permanent.

The eastern half of the venue will feature the main stage—positioned in the northeast corner against Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue—with the Sunset Stage just west of it and the six-legged “spider” stage for electronic/DJ acts just south. A Ferris wheel and the grass areas will share the west half with the City of Rock.

Luis Justo, CEO of Rock in Rio, also said that $25 million in sponsorship money had been raised (with a total of $150 million expected by May), and that the late September/early October pre-sale had done well, with ticketbuyers hailing from 32 different countries. “This is really a global phenomenon, on a Vegas scale.”

Justo told the Weekly that lineup revelations will continue to trickle out until mid-December, before January’s official onsale. Below is the main and Sunset stages' performer schedule thus far, with May 8-9 focused on traditional, classic and hard rock artists and May 15-16 centered around pop and dance acts.

May 8: No Doubt

May 9: Metallica, Linkin Park, Deftones

May 15: Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran

May 16: Bruno Mars, John Legend, Joss Stone

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