Pipe Dreams on the Strip

By Richard Zoglin/Las Vegas

The three bullet-headed blue men with the deadpan insouciance of Buster Keaton have changed hardly at all. They still do the trademark bits from their quirky, eight-year-old off-Broadway show: tubes of paint are poured onto a drum, and the resulting splashes form instant abstract art; an audience member is dragged onstage to join the Blue Men in a Twinkie banquet, which gets icky when the cream filling bursts out of their stomachs. But the stage at the Luxor Hotel, where Blue Man Group has been playing since March, is four times the size of the troupe's entire theater in New York City, and the show has become Vegas-big as well. A third of the material is new--neon figures come to life onstage in one Western-themed bit--and the pipes-and-percussion music is a more prominent part of the show. The crowd reaction is bigger too--wild and happy, like a rock concert. Buddy Hackett never had it so good.

Theater in Las Vegas, of course, has been a lot more than Buddy Hackett for some time now. Cirque du Soleil--with two shows, O and Mystere, drawing sellout crowds--has introduced a whole new audience to its lyrical mix of circus and performance art. Notre Dame de Paris, imported earlier this year to the new Paris (the Vegas hotel) from the old Paris (the French city) is an ambitious Les Miz-style opera that retells--drearily--the famed Hunchback tale. Even the town's hottest headliner, musical impressionist Danny Gans, devotes less time to the usual Vegas icons (Sinatra, Tony Bennett) than to relatively obscure (to the high rollers in the crowd, anyway) rock-era performers like Boz Scaggs and Aaron Neville.

Yet Blue Man Group is a milestone, probably the closest thing to avant-garde theater ever to make it in Vegas. The three original creators, Chris Wink, Phil Stanton and Matt Goldman, spent the first couple of months appearing in the show themselves (a whole cadre of new Blue Men have taken over in the group's three other companies), and seem unfazed by their encounter with the schlock-entertainment capital. It was Penn and Teller years ago who first suggested that the Blues take their show to Vegas. But they didn't seriously consider it until they began developing new material that needed a larger stage. "Vegas is a place that reinvents itself every six years," says Wink. "We like the idea of being part of the next reinvention."

Not that they're reinventing the game of Vegas marketing. Blue Man billboards are all over town, and the troupe gave away tickets to cabdrivers and hotel employees to help kick-start the buzz. It worked: the show is doing better than 90% of capacity, and surveys reveal that more than 20% of those who attend are locals--who don't come to the Strip for just any washed-up Motown act.

The arrival of Blue Man has prompted another performance troupe with a hit off-Broadway show, De La Guarda, to announce a Vegas run. Yet more traditional theater--the kind that depends on words as well as pictures--isn't making much headway. This is a town, after all, where the first words in reply to any request for directions are always "You go through the casino..." and where a show with an intermission is harder to find than a slot machine that doesn't eat your money. Barry Weissler, the Broadway producer whose musical Chicago spent more than a year at the Mandalay Bay, says hotel staff had to be stationed at the exits during the intermission to make sure the audience didn't wander off to the crap tables. "They thought the show was over," he says.

Gauging how well shows are doing in this hype-addled town is not easy. (For reliable figures on who's filling the house, local reporters have resorted to asking the fire department.) Some suspect that many shows are sagging, partly because of the recent boom in theme-park hotels and gourmet restaurants. "If you're going to blow $200," says Mike Weatherford, who covers shows for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "you can spend the same money on a 2-hr. meal as a 90-min. show."

The Blue Men, of course, have got this covered. They serve Twinkies.