Is Vegas Still a Great Entertainment Town?

Las Vegas has been on a roll lately. The gambling-and-entertainment capital is suddenly the hottest sports town in America: home to the former Oakland Raiders in football, soon the Oakland A’s in baseball, site of this year’s Super Bowl, as well as the Las Vegas Grand Prix, a much hyped Formula 1 race along the Las Vegas Strip. New hotels are going up (latest addition: the Fontainebleau), old ones being torn down (the Tropicana, to make way for the A’s new ballpark), and last fall the city unveiled its latest knock-your-socks-off entertainment attraction: the giant, immersive Sphere.

And yet, once past the spectacle and the sports extravaganzas, how does Vegas stack up these days for what was once (along with gambling) its bread and butter: live showroom entertainment? 

I’ve made multiple trips to Vegas over the past few years — working on my book Elvis in Vegas and the CNN documentary series it spawned, Vegas: The Story of Sin City — and just returned from another visit, where I had my first close encounter with the Sphere, and also saw Lady Gaga’s show at the Park MGM. A few observations:  

Although the Sphere is hosting a string of music headliners (U2 for the first few months, currently Dead & Company, the remains of the Grateful Dead), I caught the venue’s generic weekday show, The Sphere Experience. Its centerpiece is an hourlong film by Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, The Whale), designed to show off the venue’s immersive technology: the super-sharp, 360-degree visuals, thundering surround-sound, and vibrating seats, which can mimic the clomping of an elephant or the roar of a space rocket. The film is a lushly photographed survey of how life on earth evolved, framed by a story of astronauts who travel to a distant planet, there to start a new civilization in order to give Earth “time to heal” from the environmental damage caused by humans.  

As a theater experience, the Sphere is impressive, if not quite overwhelming: I would say an incremental, rather than revolutionary, advance in a genetic line that runs from the old Rocket to the Moon ride at Disneyland, to an IMAX screening of Avatar: The Way of Water.  I’m curious to see how the technology enhances (or simply distracts from) the rock performances. But that will have to wait for another trip.  

Lady Gaga began an extended Vegas residency in early 2019, but is in town only sporadically these days, doing two distinct shows: one showcasing her pop hits, the other — the one I saw — featuring Gaga singing mostly standards, backed by a 30-plus piece big band.

It’s a richly satisfying evening, with Gaga showing off the musicality, supple voice, and respect for the oldies she demonstrated in her duets with Tony Bennett. Her song selection is a mix of the fairly obvious (“Luck Be a Lady Tonight”) and fresher rediscoveries (Nat King Cole’s “Orange Colored Sky”), interspersed with stripped-down versions of a few of her own hits (“Poker Face,” “Bad Romance”), with Gaga accompanying herself at the piano.

The only problem, as with most everything else in Vegas today, is the bombast. The Park MGM’s Dolby Live theater, where Gaga performs, holds more than 6,000 people, and if you want to keep the ticket price under $300, you’ll be sitting in the upper reaches of the balcony, as I was. After nearly two hours of costume changes, video interludes, showy trumpet and saxophone solos, and the oddly inappropriate finale (“New York, New York”), you’re pretty much worn down.

But then, overkill is Vegas’s calling card, now more than ever. The theaters keep getting bigger (the Sphere can hold more than 18,000), the hotels grander, and ticket prices more stratospheric. You can’t get a seat for Adele — the top-drawing Vegas attraction at the moment — for less than $800 or $900, and well into four figures for a decent seat. 

Indeed, my sense (just anecdotal, not backed by any serious research) is that Vegas’s modern residency era — kicked off in 2003 by Celine Dion, followed by stars like Elton John, Jennifer Lopez, and Britney Spears — has faded just a bit. Plenty of pop stars, like Bruno Mars and Carrie Underwood, still cycle in and out of the city, as do most of the top stand-up comics (Bill Maher, Nate Bargatze, Taylor Tomlinson). But they typically do only two or three shows on the weekend. For the rest of the week, you’re pretty much left with Vegas staples like David Copperfield and Carrot Top; a slew of tribute shows and nostalgia acts; and the ubiquitous Cirque du Soleil shows, which are getting a little long in the tooth. 

The days when you could make a trip to Vegas for four or five days and have your pick of big-name acts (Frank, Sammy, Steve and Edie) every night of the week are a distant memory. Just like the all-you-can-eat buffets and — in a city that seems to reinvent itself every few months — the Tropicana Hotel.