It’s not as though this ought to come as much of a surprise, I know.
We all saw Avenue Q come and go, Hairspray come and go, The Producers come and go. We saw Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular cut back from 10 shows a week to eight. We knew that Mamma Mia! is in its final throes, even as it this month celebrated its fifth birthday, impressive by any Vegas measure. And we’ve all heard the rumors that Spamalot isn’t long for this street.
But that, my friends, is a far cry from the declaration made by the man most responsible for this decade’s Broadway wave in Las Vegas, Michael Gill.
He’s the man with his finger most firmly on the pulse of the Vegas entertainment scene, and he’s calling the body.
“If there ever was a Broadway West phenomenon, it’s done,” Gill told me this week. “Jersey Boys will be very successful. But that’s an anomaly, and that’s it. No casino I know is looking to bring another Broadway show here.”
Trust me, he would know. He’s the guy who had a hand in bringing or maintaining Chicago, We Will Rock You, Mamma Mia!, Hairspray, Phantom and now Jersey Boys.
Gill moved to Las Vegas after an impressive career in New York because he sensed a business opportunity. Vegas was on the hunt for something new and different.
Broadway, meanwhile, had become much more mainstream. Chicago did better than expected at the Mandalay Bay in 1999, a surprise success that begat Mamma Mia! thanks to its popular ABBA songbook. And the film Chicago won Best Picture at the Oscars and was a box-office champ.
And so came the parade of titles, kicked off loudly by Steve Wynn’s tossing big bucks at Avenue Q and then Spamalot and declaring that he could personally, through the force of his own personality, change the tastes of Las Vegas tourists.
Many journalists got caught up in the frenzy, myself included. I had written skeptically of the chances for Mamma Mia!, so having been proved wrong I drank the Kool-Aid. To behold the juggernaut of Mamma Mia! was to see the trashing of decades of conventional wisdom about Vegas visitors, that they wouldn’t follow a plot-driven show, that they wouldn’t stick around through an intermission, that they wouldn’t attend a show they could see in several other cities or one best described as the stage version of a chick flick.
All of that disproved, it seemed anything was possible. Sure, We Will Rock You was a failure, but it was also a terrible show and a West End, not Broadway, import. I recall in the heady summer of 2005, when Phantom, Avenue Q, Hairspray and Spamalot were all Vegas-bound, being confused when I called David Stone, producer of the smash Wicked, only to find he wasn’t swept up in the hype. “Vegas is still a question mark,” Stone told me for USA Today. “We can’t really know yet what Vegas is for us. I definitely think some of these shows may work, but I don’t know that they all will.”
Boy, did he nail that. Avenue Q, which I adore, didn’t last a year. At the time, I thought maybe that was the anomaly, that such a small, urban, relevantly witty show was mismatched in a resort catering to the country-club set.
That, however, didn’t explain the failure of Hairspray, which opened with Times Square royalty Harvey Fierstein in the lead. From that, we deduced that big New York names don’t hold sway over fly-over-country guests. But then we also learned that beloved TV stars, in the persons of David Hasselhoff and Tony Danza, also failed to keep The Producers in place at Paris for longer than a year. Phantom at the Venetian seems to be healthy, but it also added that $40 million tricked-out theater experience to give it an only-in-Vegas twist. Not to mention, there’s no public reporting of box office here, so who’s to know?
Perhaps the harbinger of the end was a peculiar press conference to hype Spamalot in January 2007 at which Wynn himself was openly joking that this show could kill the Broadway West trend. Later in the year, when Wynn told me his Cirque-like aquatic spectacle Le Reve was more profitable than Spamalot, he sounded dejected. I couldn’t fathom how this could be so, given the enormous cast and expensive technical complexities of Le Reve, to which Wynn said, “You wouldn’t believe the royalties I pay” to the Monty Python crowd.
And so here we are. Jersey Boys arrives this spring at the Palazzo, and what is it? A catalogue musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons threaded together by some of the catchiest pop tunes ever.
Gill believes it’ll be a hit, and he’s vested in its success. If it is, it’ll follow the Mamma Mia! model. “It’s hard,” Gill says. “Vegas is a tough place. You have to appeal to everybody—the snobs and the elitists and the common folk.”
His company, Gill Theatrical Management, will be fine, he insists. After all, something
has to go on all those Vegas stages.
“We’re in development for other kinds of shows,” he says, “now that I know that casinos don’t want Broadway.”
Read Steve Friess’ daily blog at TheStripPodcast.blogspot.com and catch his weekly celeb-interview podcast at TheStripPodcast.com. He can be reached at [email protected].