Travelers to Vegas should beware a growing trend. Used to be, the hotels and casinos paid big bucks to the best acts and shows to perform in their showrooms…but no more. Now, it increasingly works the other way around. In what some call "play for pay" deals, the hotels rent out their showrooms to producers or acts who pay for the space. There are variations on the deals but, in most cases, the hotel demands a certain weekly fee as an advance against a percentage of the door. The hotel also can "comp" a certain number of guests to see the show free or on tickets that cost the hotel very little.
How did this change come about? Two things seem to have happened at the same time. Some of the larger hotels began to notice a disconnect between their showroom attendance and the amount of gambling in the casino. Used to be, you had to have Sinatra or Sammy or even Buddy performing to lure people in to bet. Lately, that isn't as important as it used to be. Caesars Palace tore down its showroom a few years ago and they've been taking their time building a new one.
At the same time, you've had a couple big success stories like Danny Gans. Gans is an impressionist, largely unknown outside Vegas, who now appears at the Mirage. His show costs close-to-nothing to produce: It's just him and a nine-piece band. Six nights a week, he fills the 1,260 seat showroom at $80-$100 a seat. (There are scalpers getting more than twice that.) It's not public knowledge how that wad is divided up between Gans and the hotel but obviously, someone's making a hell of a lot of money. Other acts and producers, itching for a chance to replicate such profits, are therefore willing to scrape together the investment to get into some other hotel's showroom…and they're doing it.
What does this mean to you, the consumer? A lot of reportedly-crummy, low-budget shows have recently popped up in town, sometimes in prestigious hotels. These pay-for-play shows are usually under-advertised and often close abruptly, with no notice. A friend of mine e-mails me that he recently showed up for the late performance of a show and was told that after the early show, the producers had decided to fold their tent, effective immediately. It took a few days after that for the show's name to be removed from the hotel marquee and some of its few billboards are still around.
Once, you rarely saw a bad show in Vegas. The hotels pumped cash into them just so you wouldn't feel burned and leave with a negative feeling about the casino. Now, they don't worry about such things…so we have to.