The aging (built in 1957, expanded a lot in the sixties) Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas has been on life support for some time. For a decade or more now, we've been hearing almost annual reports that it's being sold, it's being torn down, it's being replaced by one or more new "mega-resorts" on that prime acreage, etc. But nothing ever happens to the place. It just goes on and on...and of course, not much is being spent on upgrading its facilities. The last time I stayed there was at least fifteen years ago and it was falling apart then. The plan may be not to implode it but to just wait until a stiff breeze blows the place down.
Something is changing, though. The hotel just got a new president and he promptly announced the closure of the long-running show there, the Folies Bergere. It opened on Christmas Day of 1959 and will close March 28. That will leave Jubilee! at Bally's as the last of its kind...the big production show in the classic Vegas tradition.
Most shows in Vegas are suffering these days. A few years back, there was a period when ticket prices were being increased on what felt like a daily basis. A number of hotels found that they could hike the fees up and sell just as many seats as before...so they hiked up fees. They probably hiked them too much and now they have to spread around discount coupons and it isn't the same. Something like the Folies probably suffers from sheer permanence. People who saw it ten or twenty years ago know it hasn't changed much so they might as well see something else. People who haven't seen it figure they can see it anytime so they might as well go to something that won't be there next trip or the trip after or the trip after.
Well, now it's going away. I saw the show a few times — once from the wings — because I had a friend who was headlining in it for a time. The ladies were cute. The boys danced well. The costumes were great. The music was pre-recorded. I think canned accompaniment hurts this kind of show more than producers think. Yes, it still sounds great...but it creates a feeling that the show's on auto-pilot, like one of those robotic Disneyland shows where the folks on stage have to time their performances to the music track and not to the audience response.
Las Vegas is facing a lot of cost-cutting. In the fiscal year ending June 30 of last year, profits for Nevada casinos fell 69%. That ain't so good and it's only gotten worse since then. At the same time, new and bigger hotels are opening, which further puts the pressure on places like the Tropicana. In dumping the Folies, they're probably looking to get out of financing whatever's in their showroom and to get some other show to come in a four-wall basis (as discussed here). The idea is to transfer the monetary risk to someone else and just play landlord.
Something's going to bust but in the meantime, it's not a bad time to visit Las Vegas. If you click around on the web, you can usually find a decent room for under $50 a night midweek, and not that much more on weekends unless there's a big convention in town. Most of the buffets and low-end restaurants are dropping prices. That's something that hasn't happened in a long time. You can eat quite well there for under $25 a day...and there are things to do for free if you don't have the money to gamble. Just walking around the newer hotels opened by Steve Wynn can be quite entertainining, even if you can't afford to eat in one. Or see most shows.
You see, at the same time, the high-end eateries are charging more and the top shows are keeping prices high. Tickets for Bette Midler run from $86 to $227. Elton John goes from $100 to $250. Cher can be seen for a low of $95 to a high of $250. Barry Manilow runs $95 to $225. Contrast that to the ticket prices for the Folies Bergere, which ran $35 to $45. They're not only closing the oldest show in Vegas but one of the cheapest.
So what's happening is that that you have this ever-widening gap between Rich and Poor, those who can afford the top and those who scrape along the bottom. It's kind of like a microcosm of what's happening in the United States, except with sequins.
I'm getting a lot of e-mail about Bill Hicks...and I don't really have any interest in debating how funny he was. Obviously, he made a lot of people laugh and if you can do that, you're funny. You don't have to be funny to everyone to be funny.
Several folks wrote to express a sentiment that is well represented by this paragraph in an e-mail from Andy Rose...
What respect I did have for Hicks (as an okay comedian) was lost after the Letterman incident...not because of what he said on the show, but because of his obnoxious behavior afterward. He seemed to think that being on TV was some sort of birthright. How dare the country be shielded from his speaking truth to power about what a buffoon Billy Ray Cyrus is! At any rate, I just wish Hicks fans could accept that some people don't find him funny, rather than assuming that detractors are intolerant or "just not ready for him."
Yeah, I think that kind of speaks to some of what leaves me cool to Hicks. There's a certain arrogance, if not in his performances then in much of the hype that surrounded them, and the performances I've seen have not lived up to that hype. On the other hand, I never got to see the guy in a club and I would never have appreciated all that Sam Kinison had to offer if I hadn't seen him in person. If you only knew Sam from the short bits he did on SNL or talk shows, you'd wonder what all the fuss was about. So I'm willing to give Bill Hicks the benefit of that doubt.
I could even make the case that Mr. Letterman is beating himself up too much for his decision to cut the routine. It was a mistake, but it probably seems like a bigger one than it was because of the comedian's untimely death. And it's not like Dave had anything to do with that. On the whole, Letterman was probably more supportive of the career of Bill Hicks than just about anyone else. An awful lot of the clubs that booked Bill Hicks and an awful lot of the people who paid to see him were because of his many appearances on Dave's show.
In his defense, Letterman might have pointed out that his show was new to CBS at the time. There was a lot of tension about the ratings and a lot of mistakes were being made. That wouldn't make it wise to cut the segment but Mr. Hicks might have viewed it in that context and not treated it as an all-out assault on Free Speech and Truth. Another comedian in that situation would probably have tried to use it to his advantage, having his agent pressure the Letterman people to "make it up to his client" with more and better bookings.
Two other things. A couple folks wrote to ask if I thought Letterman's decision to run the segment and apologize was due to rumors that Ron Howard will soon make a movie about Bill Hicks with Russell Crowe in the lead. Perhaps. Even if the incident with Dave isn't included in the film, it's likely to be mentioned in the press coverage, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to deal with a lingering issue before then. As for the movie...I never like to prejudge a movie — especially one that hasn't even been made yet — so I'll just say that I hope that if they make it, it does more for the memory of Bill Hicks than that Jim Carrey pic did for Andy Kaufman.
Lastly: Jeri Rainer wrote to ask, "After they cut [Hicks] from that episode of Dave's show, what did they replace it with to make up the time?" Answer: They edited in a stand-up routine by Bill Scheft, a writer and performer who works with Letterman, usually handling the audience warm-up. A few weeks earlier, before he debuted on CBS, Dave taped a couple of "test" shows, not to be aired but just to get the bugs out. On one of these, Scheft performed so they had that material available.
But it probably wasn't just a matter of tossing out the tape of Hicks and cutting in the Scheft spot. Hicks was announced in the opening. Dave probably mentioned him in the monologue and maybe in other teasers throughout the show...and then there was the matter of Dave's intro. They must have gotten Dave back into the outfit he wore during that taping and recorded a new intro, and maybe some other bits. I seem to recall that the show's announcer, who was then Bill Wendell, was either unavailable or unwilling to return to the studio to tape a new voiceover for the intro so Dave himself did it. It was a lot of work to remove Hicks's performance...so at least that night, someone (probably Letterman) must have felt strongly that it would have caused problems to leave it in. Which makes the decision to apologize and air it all the more meaningful.
Here's a preview of an upcoming documentary on the best actress in the world, voice legend June Foray. That's Gary Owens narrating and I'm in there somewhere...
Beau Weaver is one of those folks whose voice you hear constantly on TV and the radio without knowing who it is. He's among the ten-or-so workingest announcers and voiceover artists in the field. Over at his new blog, he wrote a piece about Rush Limbaugh that pretty much coincides with my view of the guy. It's an act and a very successful one...but it's not a substitute for reality.
Tonight on the late night GSN rerun of What's My Line?, one of the guests is Ingemar Johansson, who was then the Heavyweight Boxing Champion of Europe. Mr. Johansson passed away the other day but this is not a tribute airing. It's just a coincidence that it comes up now in the rotation. The Mystery Guest, by the way, is Burl Ives.
Then right after that on the To Tell the Truth rerun, one of the segments features Shirley Dinsdale, a ventriloquist and kid show host in the earliest days of television. Ms. Dinsdale worked with a dummy named Judy Splinters and was truly one of the superstars of her day. In 1948, she won the very first Emmy Award ever presented.
And you might want to set your VCR or TiVo for (or maybe just watch) the episode of To Tell the Truth they're rerunning on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. It's from May 6, 1958 and in one of the games, the panel has to identify which of three men is the real Dr. Seuss.
February 2, 2009
