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Stage

'Viva Vegas' mostly like the real strip

By BARBARA L. FREDRICKSEN
Published April 23, 2006

Imagine a two-hour jaunt through seven Las Vegas showrooms, and that's just about what you get at Viva Vegas, the high-powered musical variety show playing through May 28 at the Show Palace Dinner Theatre in Hudson.

With big, big costumes, fine singers, dancers and comics, Tom Hansen's flashing, flashy art deco sets, and two of the strangest Elvis impersonators you'll ever see, VV is two solid hours of high-energy entertainment that will leave you as exhilarated as a night strolling the real strip.

The heart of the show is singer-dancer-comic Matthew McGee, who also co-wrote the show with New York singer-comic Candler Budd. The two just wound up a record-breaking stint in The Big Bang at American Stage in St. Petersburg and continue on a roll with this show. There are few missteps (Do we really need to know that each blacklighted, tassel-twirling stripper is a Sadie, the Married Lady? Do we really need to give the fog machine so many workouts?) but lots of high kicks and plenty of laughs.

And although McGee warns the audience that there will be "blue material" because, after all, "you're in Vegas," it's a light, sky blue, with no nudity and just enough off-color language and jokes to let you know that you're at a show for grownups.

The show has spoofs of Las Vegas staples - a gaggle of middle-aged New York tourist ladies stuffing dollar bills in the G-strings of well-built, nearly-bare male strippers; a smarmy wedding chapel where the proprietor (McGee) gives a sly nudge to Britney Spears' on-off marriage with a play of words on a famous Spears song; a drag show with genuinely talented female impersonators; and a chorus girl (a gorgeous Millicent K. Hunnicutt caressing The Good Life) who suggests she may have come to Vegas to be a hooker and just lucks into a song-and-dance gig.

The show starts out with a humongous production number full of spangled, bejeweled and finely feathered girls, then continues the Vegas tone as crooner Robert Case, making his Show Palace debut, urges everyone to Come Fly With Me, never mind a couple of opening night warbles.

McGee and choreographer Katie Kerwin continue that idea with This Could Be the Start of Something Big, with Kerwin and the snappy male dance line reinforcing the theme with Big Time - during which Kerwin's right-on-pitch belt is so big that it could make your eardrums bleed.

The individual numbers do a good job of linking the longer showroom productions. The Neon Cowboy sequence is part pantomime, part slapstick comedy and part boot scootin' clog dancing, and lots of country hits (Hunnicutt in a plaintive When Will I Be Loved; Kerwin in a hokey Stand By Your Man), the whole thing an obvious favorite with the opening night crowd.

That's followed by a mellow salute to Hollywood, with glam outfits, crooner Case finally finding his full voice and a mesmerizing couple (Zack Fowler and Lacey Vazquez) in a graceful ballet.

The act winds up with an all-out Copacabana-style show, starting with a comically provocative Girl From Ipanema and ending with the stage full of whirling color and leaping dancers. (But why the long-legged, bikini-clad Ipanema girl needs a body mike and the accompanying battery pack bump on her backside eludes me.)

Act 2 brings back the female impersonators and gives the audience an all-too-brief sample of the falsetto singing prowess of a couple of them. It also showcases Hunnicutt (a sultry Fever and touching The Way of Love), Kerwin (a dramatic Diamonds Are Forever) and Case (a powerful My Way) and winds up with a huge production number.

McGee and Budd outdid themselves with this script, keeping a good rhythm going and creating some fresh material, though one might suspect that the quick-thinking McGee ad-libs a lot of his best stuff. (But isn't the hallmark of a fine comedian the appearance of spontaneity?)

Even so, there are a couple of "break the illusion" moments - McGee picking up after the strippers and bringing attention to a prop change before the Latin segment - that have to go in order to keep up the overall atmosphere of the carefree, work-free, above-it-all Vegas style.

[Last modified April 23, 2006, 00:50:21]