Vegas, baby!
Showgirls. Spangles. A full-body scan at airport security before you ever actually see a slot machine — Drop about $600 on a last-minute plane ticket and all that could be yours tonight!
On the other hand, a $25 ticket to “The Vegas Show on the Square” in Marietta offers nearly the same experience. Plus a chance to see the late, great Liberace rise from the ... er, orchestra pit.
Unlike the real Vegas, where everything stays — you know the commercial — what happens at the Earl Smith Strand Theatre could only happen at the Earl Smith Strand Theatre, apparently.
“He said, ‘Are you sitting down?’” Strand house organist Ron Carter laughingly recalled when “Vegas Show” director Earl Reece first described his idea for temporarily reviving the flamboyant showman for a musical medley at the start of Act II. “Just like that, I became ‘LibeRonC.’”
“Just like that” also describes the entire “Vegas Show,” a “don’t blink or you could miss the fake [Justin] Bieber act”-style revue debuting at the Strand tonight.
“I don’t want more than two seconds between any numbers,” Reece said this week as the cast rehearsed its singing-and-dancing speed read through decades of Sin City showstoppers, from Elvis and the Rat Pack to Barry Manilow and Britney Spears (OK, so maybe some of the “showstoppers” are more like train wrecks). “It keeps the people coming back for more.”
A first pass at reviving and reinventing the genre at the Strand, a Motown-themed revue, sold out every performance last Fourth of July weekend. After “Vegas,” similar short-run revues built around the music of Broadway, Hollywood and Nashville could follow.
Why, it’s practically in the DNA of the Strand, an art deco movie “palace” built in 1935. “That was the time of vaudeville and live variety shows,” pointed out Reece, the Strand’s executive director.
The “Vegas Show” is a joint fundraiser for the Cobb County Humane Society and the Strand, which a community fundraising campaign helped restore several years ago. It’s now the full-time home of the Atlanta Lyric Theatre, and also plays host to more than 500 public and private events annually.
The cast had only two weeks to get the notes, choreography and timing just right to pull off 22 numbers and 170 costume changes.
“You try not to get ’em mixed up,” Carl Windom, 24, of Atlanta said with a chuckle, about being part of two well-known ensembles. “The Temptations and the Backstreet Boys require different personalities.”
The 19 cast members’ experience includes those from Zach Seabaugh, a seventh-grader at Pine Mountain Middle School in Kennesaw who’s making his professional debut singing Bieber’s hit “Baby.” “I’m growing my hair,” Zach shrugged about prepping for possible teen idol-hood. And also those of more seasoned pros like Windom (VH1’s “Single Ladies”) and Findley Hansard (the Marietta native is just off a national tour of “Grease”).
There’s a little something for everyone in the audience: If you’re not bawling when Sara Vonzine of McDonough does Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All,” you’ll be smiling as the Strand’s organ soars into the air with a gaudily garbed Carter playing along to a Liberace CD.
A slot machine in the lobby’s just a nonfunctioning prop. But the showgirls are real.
Especially during the finale, when their headdresses call to mind a certain iconic figure that stands tall, proud — and feathered — over Marietta. Anything more than that, Reece says, you’ll just have to come see “The Vegas Show.”
After all, what happens at the Earl Smith Strand Theatre could only happen at the Earl Smith Strand Theatre.
PERFORMANCE PREVIEW
“The Vegas Show on the Square”
8 p.m. today-Saturday. $25. Earl Smith Strand Theatre, 117 N. Park Square, Marietta. 770-293-0080, www.earlsmithstrand.org.
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