Iconic Las Vegas show is finally moving to the Strip
This Strip-tease has gone on for more than 20 years.
The famously bow-tied Chippendales male revue is uprooting from the off-Strip Rio to Linq Hotel’s Mat Franco Theatre on Jan. 14. The show will run 9 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, with additional shows 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
The Chipps close their run at their second-floor Rio venue on New Year’s Eve. The revue opened at the hotel in 2001.
Chippendales Director of Operations Katerina Tabakhov said in a statement the production was “thrilled to be back in the Caesars Entertainment family.” The Rio is owned by Dreamscape Companies; the Chipps opened at the hotel in 2001, under Harrah’s and later Caesars Entertainment ownership.
Linq Senior Vice President and Vice President Dan Walsh said his hotel is “the perfect place for a party,” nodding to the hotel’s wide-ranging entertainment.
Swift-selling magician Franco has headlined in his namesake theater since 2015. Spiegelworld’s new “DiscoShow” and accompanying Diner Ross restaurant are draws at the hotel, which opens to Linq Promenade.
Months in planning, the Chipps’ move was announced six weeks after Actors’ Equity Association announced the show’s dancers were planning to unionize. The dancers involved in the effort claim the show pays substandard wages and lacks health benefits.
Tabakhov has since met one-on-one with cast members, she says, to clear up “confusion about what having a union could mean.”
Equity has countered by filing an Unfair Labor Practices complaint to the National Labor Relations Board against the show’s producers, alleging dancers have been taken out of the show as punishment for moving forward to unionize.
A vote on the matter among those cast members has not yet been scheduled by the NLRB.
Chippendales has been the center of relocation speculation dating at least to COVID shutdown. The show was reportedly in talks with multiple venues, including Omnia Nightclub at Caesars Palace.
The show has played its current 400-seat theater since 2004, when it moved from the Rio’s casino-level showroom. In all, it has performed 9,000 shows to several thousand bachelorette parties, selling more than 1 million tickets.
The Las Vegas production has added such “stunt” celeb cast members as actor/model Tyson Beckford, “Jersey Shore” mainstay Vinny Guadagnino, and this past spring, “Dancing with the Stars” professional Gleb Savchenko.
Among the guest stars was former “Beverly Hills 90210” co-star Ian Ziering, who said of his run in 2013, “There’s no smarm to this. It’s just a good, fun, sexy well-produced show.”
John Katsilometes’ column runs daily in the A section. His “PodKats!” podcast can be found at reviewjournal.com/podcasts. Contact him at jkatsilometes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @johnnykats on X, @JohnnyKats1 on Instagram.