Monday, March 25, 8:33 p.m.
Taking a seat with friends at Empire Ballroom, I confirm that this is indeed a showcase, meaning that most of the people in the room do not represent the club-going public or even the media, but are largely marketing folk, talent buyers and casino entertainment directors. They are here to see if Chicago house-music legend DJ Mickey “Mixin” Oliver’s electronic dance revue In-Ten-Si-T Reloaded is a good fit for their property.
Like them, I have been burned before. Few shows are ever booked for long-term production, and even fewer sustain overwhelming success. Fewer still aim to combine live choreography, instruments and vocals with house music for a whopping 75 minutes.
The dance floor is set up with go-go cages and platforms. After a short welcome from a pretty blonde with a completely fake British accent (one Brit in the crowd feigns insult), the James Bond theme remix starts. And stops. And starts.
Eight leggy ladies in sparkly tear-away evening gowns take the stage for Scene 1. Their moves on this new stage are tentative but overall, well-practiced. Feet tap, heads bob. While they change costume, girls in fuzzy black go-go boots hop up onto the platforms, and body-painted tigresses paw around inside the cages.
Scene 2: “YMCA” with all the trimmings—feathered headdress, sexy cop, sexy construction worker wielding what I pray is only a toy hammer. We still haven’t met Mickey Oliver, so I’m starting to wonder, who’s doing the mixin’?
The faux-Brit returns and proclaims Oliver and the ancient Hot Mix Five the inventors of house music; Oliver’s best-known track “In-Ten-Si-T” dropped in 1986. I cringe a little. A chatter rises and falls in the crowd while we consider these credentials, delivered in a not-quite-BBC-quality accent while Oliver’s childhood photos scroll over the screens.
Scene 3: Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” In baggy jeans and hot pink bras, the girls get their first chance to really strut. A mock break-dance battle is adorable when you’re only half-dressed. They reappear in western outfits for Scene 4, a Dallas Cowboys-cheerleaders-after-dark take on “Born on the Bayou.”
A hula hoop act is followed by two songs with vocalist Raquela and two girls pretending to play a guitar and a bass, and then an aerial performance by two silk-dancers. Silks are always a crowd-pleaser, though they’ve been around so long, no one in Vegas is really impressed any longer.
Scene 5: Another ensemble number to a real house-music song, something you might easily hear during afterhours. But Oliver is gone from his post. The scenes were once arranged to be a progression of house-music remixes through the years, but instead we seem to volley back and forth among the ’70s, today and everywhere in between. “Toot toot, beep beep,” Raquela sings a disco standard, and the dancers frolic in canes and top hats.
In the darkness after a brief video showing the girls being themselves outside of their dancer roles—if themselves means dancing on bars and walking through a casino in lingerie—a small piano (“pee-YAH-no,” says the emcee) is rolled on. Oliver takes the bench and pecks away while Raquela belts out a few more live house tunes, made all the more live with the addition of Oliver’s tickling ivories. The silks start going again, and it’s quickly apparent that this is the big finale.
It’s hard to break into Vegas without a pedigree or a hotel president’s endorsement. Showcases are a necessity, if only to give a taste of what could be. What should be, at least according to me, is a shorter show where Oliver spins four songs at most or a medley of songs mash-up-style, stopping by each signpost on the road from Chicago house music’s inception to today. Let the dancers dance, let the singer sing, and start the show at 1 a.m. on an already wild Saturday night in a club. Then maybe …
Any DJ worth his wax will tell you the heart of Chicago house music has more intensity than this. How great would it be if Oliver could harness it for us and bring it back, still beating?