It’s not a Las Vegas nightclub, but there will be music, dancing and DJs. It’s not a sprawling theater, but there will be superstar residencies performed by Kylie Minogue and Christina Aguilera, for starters. It’s not a supper club—there’s no supper—but it’s ready to provide a unique night of entertainment with the sophisticated ambiance you’d find at those glamorous venues on the Strip.
Voltaire Belle de Nuit is something new, a creative hybrid of familiar, big Vegas experiences, neatly packaged in an intimate and stylish environment. Located at Venetian in the former 1,700-seat Opaline Theater, it’s set to debut November 3 with Minogue’s first Strip residency show, but the space will be nothing like the previous theater. Capacity allows no more than 1,000 people at Voltaire, which will feel more like a cabaret-style room than the much larger venues along the Boulevard that could accommodate a string of concerts from a pop star of her magnitude.
“The creative team has designed an environment where people can get up and dance at their tables and revel in the night,” Minogue said in a statement when the show was announced in July. “That’s what Voltaire is and I can’t wait to perform in this intimate and exciting setting.”
Founder Michael Gruber—a producer and former Caesars Entertainment exec and partner at Drai’s Group where he was instrumental in bringing live, full-length concerts to the rooftop nightclub—says Voltaire will fill a special void in Vegas entertainment and nightlife; it’s all about adding another layer of intimacy when live entertainment keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Kylie Minogue
“Everything is getting supersized, so how do you bring back a little bit of what Vegas was, at least when I grew up, when you saw Elvis and Frank and Don Rickles and Dean Martin with a few hundred people,” he says. “Those people all felt special that they got to be a part of that evening, and I think that still lives on somewhat with the Adele and Bruno Mars [shows] and others. But I think we’re taking one step closer to that, with high sophistication and intimacy for a great evening out.”
When there’s a headliner at Voltaire, the warm-up act will be a show of its own that invokes “burlesque, drag, cirque and cabaret,” Gruber says, for about an hour and 15 minutes. When there’s no headliner, that performance will be the main attraction, giving way later in the evening to DJs and a different energy.
Minogue, the 55-year-old Australian icon who’s long been rumored for a Vegas run, has memorable throwback dance hits like “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” and new smash material like “Padam Padam” at her disposal. She released new album Tension to acclaim in September, perfect timing for this project, Gruber says.
“We both lucked out in her album being as strong as it is, the singles as strong as they are,” he says. “This is an artist who, for four decades, has No. 1 hits across the world, quite rare. If you look at other [resident] artists here, they put out albums, but do they really have something that sits atop the global numbers game the way she does?”
Minogue’s dates stretch into the spring, while Aguilera, whose The Xperience residency ran for a year at Planet Hollywood in 2019, will make her Voltaire debut for New Year’s Eve weekend. Both shows are expected to amp up the production in their own respective ways to take advantage of each singer’s musical legacy and the more stylized environment.
No matter who’s onstage, Voltaire brings an intriguing addition the entertainment landscape at Venetian. The connected resorts already offer legacy-act headliners at the 1,800-seat Venetian Theatre; comedy, music and more at the 750-seat Summit Showroom; Spiegelworld’s riotous Atomic Saloon Show; and established club programming at Tao Nightclub and Tao Beach Dayclub. And then, of course, you have U2 at Sphere just behind the hotel towers, the perfect example of Gruber’s supersized entertainment trend.
“We are trying to give the customer the option to fill the void from 9:30 until 1:30 a.m.,” and that timeframe has not traditionally been Venetian’s strength, he says. “It was made a big goal to elevate our entertainment, and this is part of that goal.”
VOLTAIRE BELLE DE NUIT Venetian, voltairelv.com. Friday & Saturday, 9:30 p.m.-late.
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