Merry Friessmas, everyone! Here's this week's column, which is based to some extent on the interview that is on this week's episode of "The Strip." Enjoy!
Jerry-rigged Vegas
A Springer residency here could be a huge boost
By STEVE FRIESS
It’s not being billed as such, but there’s a concert this weekend that could very well redefine Vegas entertainment.
Okay, that’s overstating it a smidge. But the big show on Friday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena featuring newly crowned America’s Got Talent winner Neal Boyd and five of the show’s also-rans has the potential to spawn not one but two show-biz innovations that could finally move the Strip past its predictable diet of magicians, Cirque, past-their-prime vocalists and Broadway.
First, and most obviously, the success of the MGM event could reinvigorate the moribund variety-show genre in a sensational way. Thus far, America’s Got Talent has not gone the American Idol and Dancing With the Stars route with national tours featuring its top talents, and that may very well be because the correct approach to bounce off the NBC talent show’s phenomenal ratings would be to get a Vegas showroom and stage an AGT-branded show of rotating favorite acts.
This isn’t mere speculation; no less than AGT emcee Jerry Springer is working on it.
“I would love to do that, I have started some talks with them to do that,” said the 64-year-old trash-TV talk-show host, who will be here to emcee the MGM gig. “We have enough acts now in our stable that you wouldn’t have to do the same acts every night; you could work out schedules. Doing America’s Got Talent in Vegas is a natural because that is the place of variety.”
Read the rest HERE
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