Showgirls endangered species

Nobody wants the showgirl to go away. But nobody knows what to do with her either.

“Does everyone like to watch a beautiful showgirl? Absolutely,” says local attorney Akke Levin. Performing as Aki, she was the rare showgirl to get star billing in the Stardust’s “Enter the Night” revue from 1995 through 1999.

But she also says, “People in this town don’t realize what they’ve had. And then they ruin it. They’ve ruined a lot of history in this town, and now the showgirls are going away.”

Last night’s closing of “Folies Bergere” puts the Vegas postcard icon on the endangered list. “Jubilee!” is the only full-blown old-Vegas revue, though the traditional heels and headpieces do turn up in smaller shows such as “Legends in Concert.”

What about sexy cabaret revues such as “Fantasy” and “Crazy Girls”? Good question. They blur the definition and, for lack of an alternative, assume the mantle.

The old shows were “more about the show than the girl,” “Fantasy” producer Anita Mann noted a few years ago. “What we do is now about the woman and not about the show as much.”

But for a good 30 years, showgirls were synonymous with plumage, pageantry and plurality. In 1959, the Paris revue format was so new to the United States that a United Press International feature was compelled to clarify “so-called ‘nude show girls’ ” weren’t the same as strippers or burlesque dancers. “(T)hey walk out on stage in spectacular skirts and headgear, and that’s about it.”

But standing topless on a staircase doesn’t really cut it anymore. A showgirl spectacle would be phenomenally expensive in today’s dollars. So it remains “frozen in its time, because it hasn’t been able to move forward,” says choreographer Jerry Mitchell, whose new “Peepshow” draws its inspiration more from burlesque, a parallel branch of the old school.

It’s one thing to see Mayor Oscar Goodman book-ended by showgirls. It’s another to invent a new context for them.

“Folies” director Jerry Jackson always maintained he could have updated the revue if given the money. Instead, low-budget additions put the final version closer to cabaret, with stripper chair-dances to Christina Aguilera’s “Nasty Naughty Boy.”

Maybe our girl needs the modern vision of a David LaChapelle or Baz Luhrmann. Their ideas would be provocative. But would they be commercial?

Ari Levin, who is married to Akke, once oversaw “Folies” when he was the Tropicana’s entertainment director. He believes the old girl can be saved.

“It’s just a matter of updating. It is what Vegas is famous for still,” he says. When the NBA All-Star game came to Las Vegas in 2007, “They could have had anything they wanted, and what did they pick? Thirty-odd showgirls.”

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