Let's get off the subject of politics. As you probably heard, Siegfried Fischbacher — who was one half of the popular duo Siegfried and Roy — died last week at the age of 81. His partner Roy Horn died last May.
Siegfried and Roy were superstars of magic and Las Vegas. They first played that town as the star act of the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana in 1967. In 1978, they got their own show — Beyond Belief — at the Frontier and then in 1987, Vegas Mogul Steve Wynn signed them to be the star attraction at his new hotel, The Mirage, when it opened three years later. The showroom was built to their specifications, the money end of the deal was astronomical…and suddenly, every hotel in Las Vegas was looking for its own superstar magician or team to compete and every magician who did "Grand Illusion" (big tricks) was trying to get a Vegas residency.
I saw their show at the Mirage a grand total of once. If you went in expecting to be dazzled by incredible illusions and beautiful live animals, you were not disappointed, though I think I was more impressed with the folks who designed and built the illusions than with the two men who fronted the show. I remember thinking that apart from the handling of the big cats, elephant and other creatures — which was mostly done by Roy — most of the magic was the kind that anyone could learn to "perform." You just had to stand in the right place and point to the right thing as the stage crew pulled the levers.
This may sound like a "faint praise" review and I guess it is. I'm not as fond of animal acts as I used to be and I like my magicians with more personality and I like to see them doing the tricks instead of the tech guys. But there was no denying that millions of people passed through that showroom and enjoyed the hell out of what went on in there and that S-and-R, as some called them, did a lot to promote the art form. And of course, I wouldn't expect a magician working in a show that size to be standing on stage doing sleight-of-hand card tricks.
Their long run there ended abruptly when…well, there are two versions of what happened on stage the night of October 3, 2003. One is that Roy had some sort of stroke in the middle of the show and Mantecore the White Tiger, sensing his master/friend was ill, locked his jaws onto Roy's neck to drag him offstage and in the process, caused him to lose enough blood to make the stroke worse. The other is that Mantecore for reasons unknown simply attacked and mauled Roy.
Take your pick. Either way, the result was the same: Roy seriously disabled and the end of the act. Such an awful way for one of the most popular live shows ever to come to a close.
Our video today is a 46 minute version of what they did six nights week at the Mirage, not only trimmed down but modified somewhat for the cameras. It will still give you a good idea of what the show was like and what Siegfried and Roy did to become that rich and that famous. It doesn't fully capture what was great about the performance, magic sometimes being a "you had to be there" kind of experience. But you'll see why the countless folks who went to see them thought it was well worth the price of the not-inexpensive tickets…