Cee Lo’s ‘Loberace’ has too much karaoke, not enough old-school basics

Cee Lo, if you were on my team as a TV talent-show contestant and I was your coach, I’d have some advice for you. And it starts with this:

Stripper nuns, Boy George impersonators and mini-yous aren’t automatically a bad idea. Especially after midnight. But you gotta take care of the basics first. Stripper nuns aren’t a right, they’re a privilege. You’ve got to earn them.

Listen, you’ve got a lot working for you, and we both want to see this Vegas thing work. You could be good for this town and this “Loberace” thing at Planet Hollywood could be great for you.

One reason so many people like you is you’re an old-school guy making it in an Auto-Tune world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t want to be a Las Vegas headliner and call your show “Loberace,” right?

But old-school guys wouldn’t go onstage without a band. Boyz II Men opened the same week as you and they have a fine band; three horns, the whole bit. And while they seem to be doing O.K. these days, they probably didn’t make the $20 million the New York Times said you made in 2011.

So you’re up there singing to recorded tracks, but you have 10 showgirls. What’s up with that? Perhaps because your voice was isolated against those tracks, it seemed to wear thin over the course of this show, like your range kept shrinking.

Could we get you to think about maybe six musicians and four dancing girls?

Maybe you did this because your show starts late — after 11 p.m. most nights, after midnight on Saturdays — and the other sit-down shows that start late tend to be topless cabaret things like “Fantasy.”

Your girls are smokin’ hot, don’t get me wrong. But the women in the audience didn’t get a lot of warning about these gals crawling under your legs and administering self-spankings. Nowhere on the poster does it say, “Cee Lo sings karaoke while hot women shake that stuff.” (Note to marketing department: Explore this. Might pull more of the 21-to-35 male demo.)

And the late-night start? Hmm. Some ideas are brave and worth a test. This one made sense, to try to pull in some of the club crowd by throwing a campy party where you cover INXS’s “Need You Tonight,” Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” and have a mini-Cee Lo cover your costume change?

That just seems like it ought to work, and it sort of did by the time you surprised us with (spoiler alert) a Goodie Mob reunion that got us on our feet for the home stretch of the show.

But for the most part, your late-night habits create an obstacle. The theater was dead calm waiting for you to start the show, even on a grand-opening night where many of the guests were lubed by an open bar.

I’m scratching my head to figure out why the place wasn’t, excuse the pun, crazy. Thoughts drifted to Prince’s late-night shows at the Rio a few years ago. That’s the atmosphere you’re trying for, right? What’s the difference?

Maybe it’s that skittery line between a production show that we sit and watch — with your recorded voice at the beginning even telling us not to talk to one another — and a concert we’re supposed to stand up and feel.

You have some outrageous, bold ideas. “Imagination is an intellectual property,” you declare. And it was cool to see you do “Storm Coming” from a pulpit, in front of a giant video screen of boiling clouds, with your girls in their nun headpieces.

And if you’re not going to pay for a band? Having the old Rock-afire Explosion robots from Showbiz Pizza roll out for the uncensored version of “Forget You” was the next best thing. Brilliant.

That alone is enough to make us want you in this town. But there’s good weird and there’s weird weird. To help us tell the two apart, you have to make believers out of us much sooner. And prune out the lazy, less-imaginative stuff, such as a medley pairing “Super Freak” and “Le Freak,” which anyone could do.

The real you wanders out into the audience barefoot, looking like Sun Ra in this gold tunic, telling us your show is an “homage to the people that move me” and asking “what music these days could you possibly love? We like it, we just don’t love it.”

I think you hit the nail on the head right there. You have a few songs that could still pass the test of time. But if you want to convince us that you’re as important as the songs you sing, you have to sit us down and kick our ass.

Elton John had to be serious early-‘70s “Burn Down the Mission” Elton before he could be the glammed-out, ostrich-feather Elton. Frank Sinatra had to record all those great Capitol records before he could get lazy with the Rat Pack in the Copa Room.

So how about you put yourself in front of a band and sing like you mean it for a while?

This show was frustrating because we didn’t walk away saying “Forget You.” You’re quite a character. You pull fans from across nearly as many demographic lines as Cheech Marin or Snoop Dogg/Lion/Whoever he is these days or George Foreman, and you might even sell as much green liqueur and diet food as George does grills.

You don’t face elimination just yet. This show’s kind of that hot mess a guy knows is bad for him, but doesn’t quite want to give up on. You’re a smart guy, you can figure it out. Don’t make us bring in Blake Shelton to coach your team.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.