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Whenever the change began, American show business is today so pervasively Vegasy that we hardly notice anymore. The arty, sexy French-Canadian circus Cirque du Soleil had its breakthrough run in Manhattan before decamping this year to Las Vegas, and neither venue seemed unnatural. Big rock-'n'-roll concerts nowadays are often as much about wowie-kazowie production values -- giant video walls, neon, fireworks, suggestively costumed young men and women, clouds of pastel-colored smoke -- as music. Michael Jackson's highly stylized shtick -- the cosmetics, the wardrobe, the not-quite-dirty bumps and grinds, the Liberace-like gender-preference coyness -- is so Vegas that the city embraced him at every turn: a Jackson impersonator is a star of the Riviera's long-running show Splash; Jackson plays a spaceship commander in one of Sega's new virtual-reality video games at the Luxor; and Siegfried and Roy got the real Jackson to compose and sing their show-closing theme song, Mind Is the Magic. And Madonna? Her just finished Girlie Show world tour, with its Vegas-style dancers and meretricious Vegas-style lighting, is precisely as pseudosexy in 1993 as shows at the Flamingo were in 1963 -- decadence lite.
Back when the Rat Pack ruled, Jackie Mason played Vegas and Edward Albee was on Broadway. Today essentially idea-free spectacle -- The Phantom of the Opera, Cats -- dominates New York City's so-called legitimate theater, and stand-up comedy is ubiquitous. In the '90s, Friars Club comedians like Mason have hit Broadway shows, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Broadway musical Starlight Express has been permanently installed in the showroom of the Las Vegas Hilton. The crossbreeding seems complete.
Penn and Teller are ultra-show-biz-savvy New York intellectuals whose act is an ironic deconstruction of magic shows in addition to being a very impressive magic show (see box). They first played Vegas a year ago. Penn Jillette's fondness for Vegas, like every hip baby boomer's, is sweet-and-sour, simultaneously bemused and fond. Of a traditional Vegas variety show at Bally's called Jubilee, he rants, "In the first five minutes they destroy temples and sink a giant model of the Titanic -- there are 80 topless dancing women while the Titanic sinks, blast furnaces spewing fire. You look around you, and every single person in the crowd perceives it ironically. Every single person in the show perceives it ironically. It seems like everybody in Vegas nowadays is too hip to be in Vegas."
Serious connoisseurs of the surrealistically kitschy visit Graceland Wedding Chapel, where Norm Jones, the Elvis impersonator in residence, is both pleased and bewildered by the sudden popularity of the wedding ceremonies he performs for $250. Heavy-metal star Jon Bon Jovi got married there in 1989; Phil Joanou, director of the U2's concert film Rattle and Hum, was not only married at the Graceland Chapel but played a tape of his wedding onstage every night of the band's last American tour. In December 1992 three members of Def Leppard showed up at the door, one to get married and two to renew their vows.