Las Vegas is reeling this morn at the news. Headliner Danny Gans — "The Man of Many Voices" — died in his sleep last night. No cause has been given for the passing of the 52-year-old entertainer.
Gans had an amazing career. He'd started as a professional baseball player, mainly with the Durham Bulls. (He had a small role in the movie, Bull Durham.) An injury forced him to find another career and he became an impressionist. Though barely known outside Vegas, he was a phenomenon in that town, his success measured mainly by his ticket prices.
The show featured Gans, a tiny live band and no one else…and you'd figure tickets for something like that would be around $25 or $30 each. But he started selling out each performance so they raised prices a bit…and when he continued to sell out at the higher price, they raised it some more. And some more. And some more. At some point, he passed the level of $100 a seat. There are now a lot of shows in Las Vegas at that level but at the time Gans rose to it, there were very few and they all featured huge, expensive casts and special effects and costumes. The Danny Gans show was just Danny Gans and the musicians…and still he managed to fill a 1,250 seat theater at the Mirage for almost every performance. He recently opened a new showroom at the Encore with a top ticket price of $120.
I saw him once and he was very good, rolling through a staggering roster of impressions in about 75 minutes. Still, the presentation felt to me overpriced…and my ticket had been comped. I suppose what I admired most was that this guy had come out of nowhere and built this huge stardom out of nothing. Vegas is always full of impressionists….and Gans's success had spawned an extra wave of copycat impersonators. He was better than any of them (possible exception: Bob Anderson) but not that much better. Still, if you can't respect hype in Vegas, where can you respect it? Gans was great at it. He could not only sound like the superstars…he could charge like them.