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It's The Phantom of the Opera, so you know what to expect. Young Christine will sing with melancholy about her romantic interest in both a handsome aristocrat and a masked opera house squatter. And, of course, a large light fixture will crash.
The real star of the 95-minute version that opens here Saturday may turn out to be the theater itself: a $40 million edifice that adds an only-in-Vegas thrill-ride element. Most notably, the 1-ton chandelier made of hand-strung crystal hurtles down amid pyrotechnics from above only to stop a mere 10 feet above the heads of some in the audience.
Perhaps even more astonishing: Phantom's home at the Venetian Hotel-Casino is merely the latest elaborate entry in the Vegas side business of theater building.
"The reason one does this in Vegas is because one can," says David Rockwell, Phantom Theatre's New York-based designer. "There are the resources to do it; physically you can do it. You get to start over with something familiar."
Indeed, freed of the space constraints of Manhattan and London, and armed with money from casino conglomerates, show producers can dream bolder than on Broadway or in the West End. A single Vegas showroom can cost more than the combined budgets for all new Broadway productions for a given year.
Attracting some of the 40 million tourists who pass through Vegas each year makes it worthwhile for Caesars Palace to plunge $95 million into a showroom tailored for Celine Dion or for the MGM Grand to build a $165 million space for Cirque du Soleil's Ka.
In the case of Phantom, the version at the Venetian is actually one imagined by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and director Hal Prince when they first staged the tale in the 1980s.
"It's a dream come true," Webber says. "We can do things (here) that we could never have done in any other context."
To wit, this edition -- rebranded Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular -- will occur in an 1,800-seat playhouse designed throughout to look like the 19th-century Opera Garnier in Paris. Because the narrative starts in a ruined opera house, the audience first sees the chandelier astrew and huge canvas draping the walls. When the tale flashes back, the canvas flies off, and the chandelier pieces assemble and light up in an 80-foot-wide dome.
The trend of customizing Vegas theaters started in the early 1990s. Steve Wynn recruited Cirque to create Mystere in a $32 million building at his Treasure Island resort. That showroom, where Mystere continues to run, led to more elaborate theaters, including the $80 million O Theater in 1998 at the Bellagio and $100 million Aqua Theater in 2005 at the Wynn Las Vegas resort for Le Re^ve, a Cirque-style production by O show creator Franco Dragone.
Says Dale Hurt, Aqua Theater operations technical director: "It's not necessarily a matter of one-upping the others, but more 'Let's do something different.'"
Customized theaters have drawbacks, Dragone admits. Le Re^ve was widely panned, and Dragone says he couldn't make some changes because the showroom is so specific. Dragone was recently removed from the show, in fact, as part of an effort by Wynn to overhaul it.
Another risk: that the technology could overshadow human performers.
Prince, who won a Tony for the original Broadway version, is unconcerned. "Phantom is the last show in the world that needs defending. The reason it has run so well for all these years is because it is an intensely romantic story that people love, not because of the chandelier. And that will be the same way in Las Vegas."
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