Somewhere between Elvis and Mac King — putting Celine’s 1,000th show in context
A thousand shows. Celine Dion was to celebrate a magic number that speaks for itself Saturday at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace.
But if you really want to get picky? Add five more, from Dion’s 1996 and 1997 dates in Caesars’ bygone showroom.
Oh, and throw in the two arena concerts she did at the Thomas &Mack Center in the 1990s.
Dion will keep running up the total anyway, when she comes back in November. But if she decided not to? No one — at least no star who fills seats by the thousands — is likely to catch up to what she’s done already.
“The Colosseum opened 13 years ago. I think it will be more than 13 years before we see the next person get to a thousand shows,” says John Nelson, senior vice president of AEG Live, which operates the Colosseum. Only Elton John has played the Colosseum almost as long, and he’s at 383 shows.
Of course, Nelson is talking about 4,200-seat concert draws, and some big money. Dion’s show grossed close to $70 million a year in her busiest years.
Back in 2003, I was among the skeptics who wondered if the singer’s shelf life had expired, because it had been six years since the 1997 blockbuster “Titanic,” the peak of her pop-culture currency.
“Who would have guessed (back then) that ultimately her show in Vegas would outgross the highest-grossing movie of all time?” Nelson says of Dion’s live shows passing the $658 million (domestic box office) gross for “Titanic.”
It must be said that resident Las Vegas entertainers — anyone from David Copperfield to Carrot Top — can reach the 1,000 mark in five years or less. Mac King has done two shows a day at Harrah’s Las Vegas for almost 17 years, putting him north of 8,160 by now. Even working outside Las Vegas for part of each year, Penn &Teller are past 3,300 at the Rio.
But Penn &Teller have hosted more than 2.5 million guests since 2001, while Dion has played to more than 4 million.
The commuter model was more Dion’s in the early years, when she had a house in the Lake Las Vegas development and sang and danced her way through “A New Day” about 160 times each year. She already reached 717 when that one closed at the end of 2007. (She spent a year on tour, then came back with the current orchestra format.)
“It’s a lifestyle decision,” Nelson says. “It’s all about the number of shows. The number of weeks. The number of years.”
Pouring that much of their lives and career into Las Vegas was never a goal for Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra.
Presley’s shows are obsessively chronicled in the likes of Paul Lichter’s “Elvis in Vegas” book. The King did 637 shows at the International/Hilton, and if you add 29 from the New Frontier in 1956 — including a special matinee for teen fans — you get to the (rather ominous) number of 666.
Sinatra’s are more difficult to add up, since he first played the Desert Inn in 1951 and bowed out at the new MGM Grand in May 1994, with the Sands, Caesars Palace, Golden Nugget, Riviera and Bally’s all in between.
Even a tally of Sinatra’s Caesars Palace years is difficult. He had to cancel a few times, and did one show on some nights, two on others.
That said, a rough tally of Sinatra at Caesars from 1968 through 1983 puts him in the ballpark of 425 shows. So that’s 15 of the most productive of his 43 years on the Strip, and they still didn’t get him halfway to 1,000. But with all the years he worked here? Fans at least have reason to believe he’d be close.
One thing you can say about Dion’s Colosseum run: It brought the Strip back to the Sinatra era in terms of equating Las Vegas with star power.
In 2003, Cirque du Soleil’s grip on the Strip was so strong that Dion and her manager-husband Rene Angelil recruited “Mystere” and “O” co-creator Franco Dragone to stage “A New Day.”
Back then, the producers seemed to be hedging a very expensive bet by not counting on their star to merely sing in front of an orchestra, as she does now.
“I don’t think it was to hedge their bets. I think it was a new creative opportunity for her,” Nelson says. “I think she fell in love with that art form and loved it, and wanted to do a show of her own that had that basis in the Cirque world.”
Regardless, Cirque now seems to have peaked, while the Colosseum, which was “purpose-built for that show,” as Nelson says, will soon have plenty of competition. Stevie Nicks opens the 5,300-seat Park Theater on Dec. 17. Las Vegas Sands Corp. is partnering with The Madison Square Garden Co. for an arena-theater hybrid near the Sands Expo and Convention Center.
Add resident concert stars at Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Hotel, and the momentum has shifted from production shows to concert stars for the foreseeable future.
One final irony: Dragone’s co-creator on “O” was Gilles Ste-Croix. As Dion builds on her show total in the future, she may be doing so with him on board, after last week’s announcement that Ste-Croix joined Team Celine as “artistic adviser,” to “develop new artistic concepts and harness the necessary resources to produce them.”
Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.
