A few days ago, I wrote about a show in Vegas that made the audience extremely uncomfortable. What could be worse than that one? I dunno…how about watching Roy (of Siegfried and Roy) getting ripped to shreds by a tiger?
What an awful experience that must have been for the audience. I mean, it goes without saying it was horrible for Roy, and we can all hope it isn't as bad as the early news reports make it out to be. It was also obviously a shock to everyone backstage. But I find myself thinking about the poor people who paid $110.50 for what had to be a traumatic, ghastly experience.
News stories say the paramedics were called at 8:20. The show starts at 7:30 so the accident must have occurred about halfway into the proceedings. The show is full of wild animals coming darn close to the audience and several "fakes," meaning places where they make it look like something's gone wrong when it hasn't. When I saw it many years ago, there was one point where a befuddled lady was brought out of the audience and walked dangerously close to several lions and tigers.
She was a plant, meaning she was an actress on the show's payroll, but I don't think everyone realized that. Whatever, the audience last night (probably 30-50% children) had to have gone through great emotional whiplash, first thinking that Roy was being mauled by the tiger, then realizing it had to be a trick…then really realizing it wasn't.
And at some point, a lot of those people had to have thought, "My God…if they couldn't prevent that tiger from attacking one of the stars, maybe they couldn't prevent it from attacking someone in the first row." A lot of Vegas vacationers are probably not sleeping well at the moment.