A recent announcement has the long-awaited DiscoShow, Spiegelworld’s celebration of the music and culture of 1970s New York City, opening at the Linq next summer. It might be coming a bit later than we hoped, but the Las Vegas-based company has been busy since it reopened its three Strip shows—Absinthe, OPM and Atomic Saloon Show—after the pandemic.
DiscoShow is the second of three huge projects for Spiegelworld in collaboration with Caesars Entertainment. In June, previews begin for The Hook, a new show and venue that will be joined by a second Superfrico restaurant in a historic theater space at Caesars Atlantic City. Next year brings DiscoShow to the Las Vegas Strip, and then another show and entertainment complex will launch at Caesars New Orleans, with details yet to be announced.
To top it all off, folks have been talking about Spiegelworld’s acquisition of the town of Nipton, California, 65 miles south of Las Vegas and its apparent intentions to turn the tiny desert stop into some kind of circus city. We figured the man in charge, Ross Mollison, has some explaining to do, and he was happy to oblige.
What can you tell us about the Glitterloft—home to DiscoShow at the Linq—and what the venue will look and feel like? We don’t have an exact date yet, but we’re looking at July 2024 for either previews or opening, and we just started demolition, so it will get real quickly. I think it’s a bit like the Ski Lodge [at the Cosmopolitan] in that it could be anywhere. I think DiscoShow could actually be anywhere, but the Linq happens to be the most fantastic location, directly on the Strip, where you will be able to walk straight in off the Strip opposite Caesars. It’s the heart of all the energy on the Strip, and you’ll go straight into the bar on the ground floor and transformed back to the early or mid 1970s in New York City. Then you’ll go upstairs, like you would in any old New York building, and discover all sorts of things—the show venue, a large DJ party area and a restaurant.
You just celebrated 12 years of Absinthe at Caesars Palace and also debuted the new speakeasy, Pier 17 Yacht Club. How are you feeling about the state of Spiegelworld’s three Vegas shows? I think they’re doing fine. I’m not complaining about our business, but we do miss the convention business … [which is] especially good for us, because those people come to town with the mindset of, “What else is there to do?” The shows themselves are doing fine … and we’re coming out with a project [DiscoShow] that we’ve workshopped extensively and put onstage in New York several years back. It was in fact meant to go to the Wynn, but they did not complete the deal. But it is fantastic to have something you’re passionate about and have been working on for years specifically for Vegas.
You must be excited about opening a second location of Superfrico, Spiegelworld’s first full-scale restaurant, in Atlantic City. I think we’ll do a better job the second time, though we did a great job the first time, and our partners at the Cosmopolitan really were fabulous. We designed that space way back in 2013 to launch Rose. Rabbit. Lie., when we were mere babes crawling through the dark trying to find our way, and now we’ve had this experience and [others] and we’re pushing it all back together to design and build it exactly the way we want [in Atlantic City]. I’m super-pumped for people in Pennsylvania and the New Jersey-New York area to come down to Atlantic City and see this hundred-year-old façade of the Warner Theatre and walk in to experience our show The Hook and Superfrico and all the crazy bars and things we have planned there.
You grabbed some headlines when you announced the purchase of Nipton. What do you plan to do out there? Well, people don’t really believe us, but there’s not some grand plan. There really isn’t. We’ve owned it for about a year, and we’re just feeling our way through it. We’ve got a big day coming up [April 23], joining with the Mojave National Park Service for what I call the Moop-a-palooza—three days of cleaning up the desert—and we did our workshop out there for two weeks for Box Box, a Grand Prix [themed] show we’re working on. We weren’t even trying to get publicity; we’ve just been developing shows and acts and working toward what a Spiegelworld festival might look like out there.
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