Of the three nights I spent in Las Vegas, my brother and I saw two very good and very different shows. Here's what I thought about the two shows:
Penn&Teller: Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller have been performing together since 1975. Their magic/comedy show has been at the Rio All-Suite Hotel Casino since 2001. They are two of the wealthiest magicians and have won many awards including having their own star on The Hollywood Walk of Fame. Penn went to the Ringling Brothers Barnum Bailey Clown College and is the only one who talks during the show. Teller, used to teach Latin in high school before becoming a comedian. He noticed when he performed before college audiences in the beginning, they paid more attention to his tricks and threw less at him, when he didn't speak and it is his trademark.
The show was fun and impressive from the beginning. We had very good seats only a half dozen rows from the stage and right in the center. They came across as regular people who were having as much fun as we were. The card tricks were very good and Penn's memory is pretty amazing, or he just appears to have an incredible memory. They included members of the audience a few times and it was a fast paced and entertaining performance, definitely worth seeing. Oddly for me, the set-up at the very end of the show seemed drawn out and unlike the quick moving show. It was a very good 90 minutes and I'm glad my brother suggested it.
Having been born in 1960, I really missed most of Beatlemania and have virtually no recollection of the Beatles existing in the 1960's. I became a Paul McCartney & Wings fan in the mid-70's and didn't really discover The Beatles until 1976. I won my first two Beatle albums on a water game on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore. "Abbey Road" and "Let It Be" were the first of my 15-20 Beatle albums that I still have today.
The show, "Love", has appeared at The Mirage Hotel for the past 16 years, except for a break due to the pandemic. It is really two shows in one. On the one hand, you have The Beatles music, which is the best you will ever hear it in this special theatre. There are over 6,300 speakers and over 2,000 seats and it is said to have cost $100 million dollars to build the theatre. The show was put together with discussions between the surviving members of The Beatles and Cirque du Soleil. There are about 65 cast members who perform during the show. In the first ten years there were eight million people who attended the show.
The entrance to the theatre begins our journey. For the entire show we were treated to a wide range of Beatle music, of course hearing many of their biggest hits and some of the lesser known ones that fit in with the performance we were watching. The second show we watched was a stunning, acrobatic, artistic performance of performers running, jumping, flying, and bouncing off everything imaginable. There was constant action and amazement on how they were doing what we were watching in front of us. The movements of course were along with the music and although there was some plot it was obvious that it really didn't matter. The music mattered and the action mattered and that was really all we needed. You could tell the performance lived up to the high quality of music and when the show ended and you heard "All You Need is Love", there was no better word to describe this show, than "Love."
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