He’s back on our screens with two current TV shows, Fox’s firefighter drama 9-1-1: Lone Star and the wonderfully weird Netflix comedy Unstable, which he co-created with his son, John Owen Lowe. And Rob Lowe is back in Las Vegas, too, a place where he once spent time shooting the short-lived CBS series Dr. Vegas in Green Valley.
This week, his one-man show, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, returns to the Strip, having initially toured the country and then landed at Planet Hollywood in 2019 and early 2020. These upcoming dates at the smaller Summit Showroom at Venetian aren’t part of a tour, which got us thinking that the 59-year-old actor is exploring some sort of Vegas residency situation.
Weekly. “Between COVID and my schedule, there’s been no chance to do a tour, but I love doing the show so much. If there is a way to do that without much travel, I want to figure that out. I’m trying to see if U2 will let me move into that ball you guys are building.”“That’s exactly right,” Lowe tells the
Jokes aside, the cozy, 750-seat Summit seems like a better fit for Lowe’s unique Hollywood tales than the imposing Sphere nearby.
“My plan is to make these shows more intimate and involve the audience more,” he says. “I remember seeing Garth Brooks in Vegas [at Wynn], and when he walked out, he looked like he had just gotten there from the airport, guitar in hand, and it never felt like a show. It just felt like I was spending an amazing time with Garth Brooks, who happens to be one of the greatest entertainers I’ve ever seen. That spirit is something I want to capture, and working in the smaller theater offers me the opportunity to do what I do in a more intimate, connected way.”
Lowe already has extremely strong connections to his audience, forged through familiarity with an endless string of film roles (starting in the 1980s with The Outsiders and St. Elmo’s Fire) and some of the most popular TV series ever, The West Wing and Parks and Recreation. When he’s telling stories from his career in the stage show, it’s a bit like catching up with an old friend—just a really famous one.
“One of the things I love the most is looking out and seeing who’s shown up on any given night, and without fail, I’m just blown away,” he says. “It’s literally people in their 80s, and also teenagers, and they all have a different way that they relate to me and to my work. It’s really something.”
Fans appear to have connected in a similarly powerful way to his latest project, Unstable, perhaps because of the captivating performance of his son, who also co-wrote the Netflix comedy about an angsty son working with his father, an eccentric biotech scientist.
“It’s been a dream come true, particularly the reception of it,” Lowe says. “It all started with his trolling of me on my social media, which people really liked, and it got to the point where I couldn’t do an interview without everyone asking me about and saying, ‘I want to talk about your son.’ And wondering, is there a show around it, around that kernel of an idea? That lead us to Unstable.”
And Lowe says his fans getting to know his son through the show has been “super fun” for everyone involved. “I think it’s a bit of a look behind the curtain. There’s that added benefit of [viewers thinking], I wonder how much of this is real, and I love projects like that.”
ROB LOWE June 9 & 10, 8:30 p.m., $72-$220, Summit Showroom, ticketmaster.com.
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