Stage Door Jonny recently returned from his first visit in decades to Las Vegas, with a few days added on in Los Angeles. Despite its dry desert climate, Las Vegas certainly is a seething, fecund pit of writhing, sinewy, muscular and sexy flesh of all races and ages that may be found around the enormous free-form swimming pools of the gargantuan hotels on The Strip; the low and mid-range showrooms that feature physically perfect G-stringed men and women; or the half-dozen high-end Cirque du Soleil shows such as Zumanity, Ka, Mystere, O, Love (the newest, an extravaganza inspired by the music of the Beatles) and La Reve (a non-Cirque show by former Cirque director Franco Dragone). Jonny met several Cirque cast members and asked if it was true that they were tested monthly for body fat, and that anyone going over 3 percent was fired. It was a joke, of course, but the cast members took Jonny seriously.
The fantasy Cirque and Cirque-style shows play major Strip resort hotel/casinos, along with 90-minute versions of such Broadway hits as The Phantom of the Opera, The Producers, Mamma Mia! and Monty Python’s Spamalot. Like the athletic spectaculars, these shows are designed to run for years, and they represent enormous investments. The Las Vegas producers of Phantom, for example, built a theater for the show from the ground up at The Venetian Hotel at a cost, Jonny was told, of $45 million. The production—just 90 minutes, remember—reportedly cost $35 million more, or about five times its Broadway cost. But that’s peanuts compared to La Reve (at the Wynn Las Vegas). Its combination of extravagant flying and water technologies makes an Esther Williams spectacle look shabby, and cost $200 million to build and produce.
Regular readers will know that Jonny rarely promotes benefits because there simply are so many of them for so many worthy causes. However, rules are made to be broken and Jonny does so from time to time. This month’s instance is the July 7 performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Queer Tale, by MidTangent (sic) Productions at the National Pastime Theater, 4139 N. Broadway. The troupe will donate 100 percent of the proceeds from a special matinee performance to the Leather Archives & Museum. This is MidTangent’s third annual summertime rendition of their LGBT take on Shakespeare’s comedy of misdirected love, so it oughta be pretty good by now. Showtime is 3 p.m.; 1-800-595-4849; $20.
On June 21, Wicked officially celebrated its second anniversary in Chicago at the Ford Center/Oriental Theatre, making it the longest-running Broadway show in Chicago history (although not the longest-running musical, if one includes Off-Loop theater). So far, Wicked has played to over 2 million people from all 50 states and from countries as far away as Japan and Australia. As nearly as Jonny can tell, 93 percent of those two million have been adolescent girls or gay men—or both. Wicked is expected to play at least another full year.
Dedicated Wicked camp followers should know that the show offers hour-long backstage tours each Tuesday at 5 p.m. and Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. Behind the Emerald Curtain, as the tour is dubbed, is hosted by cast members and offers a look at the set model by scenic designer Eugene Lee; costumes by Susan Hilferty; various props and wigs; and a short film on the making of the show. The walkabout concludes with a Q&A session with your cast member guides. Call 312-902-1400; $25.
If Jonny were not going to be on vacation, he surely would be at the Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland, on July 12 at 8 p.m. for a staged reading of the complete screenplay for the dreadful 1966 Lana Turner vehicle, Madame X, directed by the fabulous team of Edward Thomas-Herrera and David Kodeski. It’s part of the Neo-Futurists’ annual summer program of trash movie scripts. 773-275-5255: $10. FYI: The series concludes July 26 with The Ten Commandments—spectacular, yes, but really awful writing.