Pictorial: Caesars' Octavius VIP Suite & Toilet

When I got the request last week to come to Caesars Palace to record a spot on this upcoming Saturday's Peter Greenberg Radio Program, I was sure there was some kind of mistake. The info indicated we'd be recording in the Marcus Aurelius Suite in the Octavius Tower, but I hadn't realized there was anything actually functioning in the otherwise gift-wrapped but empty building.

Turns out, there are three completed suites of about 11,500 square feet, each with a patio just slightly elevated from but overlooking Caesars' courtyard of pools. From what I was told while I was there, the company is in the process of completing six more such suites above and below the one I was in, but you can't rent them. They're only for VIPs.

So I took a bunch of photos, and you can either see them on Flickr with their titles/captions or here's a Flickr slideshow:

I did promise the Caesars peeps I wouldn't dwell too much on the toilet, which is why I put all of that above up front. But, umm, those toilets -- as regaled about by Oprah during commercial breaks during her taping in the Colosseum three years ago -- really is quite a thing. The seat pops up -- and warms up -- for you when you enter, and check out the remote control:


It's enough to make you say, "Holy crap!" Talk about solving a first-world problem.

Meanwhile, and perhaps tangentially related, I found this new sign by the valet door of the Augustus Tower, necessitated by the fact that Caesars now allows guests to bring their pooches, kind of oddly worded:


Just who is getting the relief? Your dog or all the other guests who are sick of hearing it yap? Just wondering.

The Show is UP: #Celine's Director and More!

Here we go again. It's sort of a two-fer, but instead of one gigantic show, we did two. Enjoy. Click on the date below to play or right-click to save the show. Or you subscribe -- for free -- in iTunes or Zune and you'll always get it first. -sf

June 22: He's Got Celine's Back

EXTRA: Celine's Back-Up (Violinist Philippe Dunnigan)

It was by far the most hyped – and to our minds the best – new show to hit the Vegas Strip this year. Celine Dion has returned to the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in a self-titled production that is radically different and vastly better than “…A New Day,” her groundbreaking first run in the vaunted showroom. Legendary TV producer Ken Ehrlich directed “Celine,” so we spoke to him at length about the intriguing decisions he, the singer and her husband made. Why didn’t they include the closing-number special effects when they opened in March? Was it weird to rehearse Celine’s duet with herself? What’s the story behind that French song that makes her cry every night? Why wasn’t the songstress at the United Center when Ehrlich produced two star-studded final-week shows for Oprah Winfrey last month?

In Banter: Anniversaries! Wynn Politics! TV Show Tapings! Maloofs! Monorail Bashing! and more.

Open & Banter: Start to 24ish
Ken Ehrlich Part I: 24-58ish
Trivia/Poll/Letters: 59-59ish
Ken Ehrlich Part II: 1:00-1:25ish
TSTToTW: 1:25-end

Links to Stuff Discussed:

Ken Ehrlich on IMDB
Philippe Dunnigan's website
Tickets for Celine Dion’s show at the Colosseum
VegasHappensHere.Com on the Electric Daisy Carnival drama
The Electric Daisy Carnival’s Vegas website
The audio of Steve Wynn’s I-Voted-Obama remark on Fox
The Street on Wynn in Singapore and Howard Stutz on Wynn and Adelson as BFFs
Wall Street Journal on Shania Twain coming to the Colosseum
It’s anniversary fever on the Strip: Jersey Boys, Phantom, Love, Jubilee!
Steve’s column about the Starkey Hearing Foundation event at the Hilton
Robin Leach’s EXCLUSIVE!!!!!! coverage of the Hell’s Kitchen taping and announcement of Gordon Ramsay restaurant at Paris
Garth Brooks is no longer sold out, according to Las Vegas Advisor
Business Week on the Maloof family now only owning 2% of the Palms
VegasInc on The Plaza’s new look is out as they plan to open by Sept. 1
Steve’s column about the Firefly not returning to Plaza
Adrienne Packer’s fun column about the 81-year-old codger who timed the monorail v walking
A picture from VegasTripping.Com about the wrap of St. Regis at the Venetian
Boyd bought stuff in the Gulf Coast
CityCenter Sales office is going to be a new Star Wars museum attraction thing

Good and bad from the weekend papers

I caught up this morning on the weekend papers, and this stuff is worth your eye:

* Howard Stutz of the R-J puts together the surprising detente between Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson, right down to the suggestion by Adelson that the epic rivals will soon dine together. Oh, to be a fly...

* Tom Gorman of the Sun has a most awesome Q-and-A with Sir Patrick Stewart on his plans to create a Vegas-set version of "The Merchant of Venice." It reminds me of the time I saw "Taming of the Shrew" staged as a Western starring Morgan Freeman and Tracey Ullman and put on by Joseph Papp in Central Park. (Side note: I once considered titling a podcast interview with Adelson as "The Merchant of Venice" but opted against doing so because because the play -- or at least the title character of Shylock -- is so notoriously anti-Semitic. I went with "Mr. Sands Man" instead.)

* J. Patrick Coolican, who has been refreshingly diversifying his columns from the monotony of politics that the Sun is addicted to, gives us a terrific piece on a 25-year-old kid living at Veer for $1,000 a month plus valet parker duties. Money quote to make Jim Murren, who pictured a different grade of humanity living in these units, cringe: "The amenities -- you can't beat 'em." Party on, dude!

* Adrienne Packer geeks out on data collected by an 81-year-old monorail obsessive who has empirically proven that, for the most part, it's faster and cheaper to walk from one casino to another than to ride the ill-placed transit system. What's more, the creative codger's analysis also indicates that the oft-cited panacea for the monorail's woes -- a link-up to McCarran -- won't work, either.

Of course, there are some jeers:

* Why does Sad Shermy still have a column in the newspaper he has legally imperiled and whose circulation he ruined? I'd much rather have seen them hold over ex-editor Thomas Mitchell's columns because at least they were (usually) original and smart meditations on a topic that doesn't get enough press, first amendment matters. Instead, we have Sad Shermy writing the same old predictable babble, only not as well or as thoughtfully as other conservative commentators who actually do some reporting.

* I adore the work of Adrienne Packer, so I hope she doesn't take this the wrong way, but the absence of any coverage of the passage and Sandoval signing of AB511, the bill that makes Nevada the first state to legalize DRIVERLESS CARS for road use, is simple dereliction. This is a major, major legislative and technological development. I understand why Carson City scribes would overlook it because they had the budget and everything else to cover, but transportation writers ought to be all over this. So should technology writers, but neither the R-J nor the Sun have one of any merit, a glaring problem. (I'm trying to get the link to my piece on this from the iPad-only The Daily.)

Check out this YouTube video on the driverless cars for background and some amazing visuals:

This could be real on the roads of Vegas a year from now, thanks to the law. Really.

* Steve Bornfeld of the R-J applied his typical staccato, sentence-fragment style to his coverage of the Daytime Emmy Awards in a piece that essentially chronicled the construct of the red carpet and the backstage post-win appearances. I do understand the instinct toward media navel-gazing (see this blog post or this whole blog!) and the desire to behave above and apart from the media silliness of such events. But in this particular case, he actually missed the story, which was how offended the audience and Emmy brass were that Oprah Winfrey did not show up for her own lengthy tribute. There was noticeable hostility in the Hilton theater as well as all over Twitter, and I'm pretty surprised that Oprah didn't just snubbed this crowd but also passed up a much-much-much-needed opportunity to plug her flailing network and its unwatched offerings. Didn't Oprah quit so she could focus on that? Also, why did they lie and pretend that Celine Dion was singing live from the Colosseum during the show when Celine's part was taped four days earlier? That sort of stuff would've made an interesting, Vegas-centric wrap-up.

* I'm completely puzzled that (a) this below is front page news, (b) that the paper misspelled the name of its own reporter of 426 years (It's Przybys, not Pyzybys, as it was corrected later online) and (c) that they ran with this thoroughly misleading headline:


What "history" was made? A California woman won a beauty pageant. She's not the first. She's not the last. She's not even all that interesting a woman, except she seems to have acquired a bit of Tudor lust thanks, probably, to Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. If there was some history made -- beyond the fact that every day is technically historic -- then John Pryzyzyzbys didn't tell us what that might've been.

* Journalists really must stop bitching, especially publicly on Twitter, about the quality of the free seats they get at various events. It truly embarrasses to them to behave so openly entitled, and it distracts from the quality of their coverage. Do they think their readers are sympathetic to the complaints of a group of people who seem to expect special treatment? This came up, too, during the opening of Celine's show at the Colosseum. The whiners' lack of self-awareness is kind of unbelievable.

* Finally, where the heck was the print coverage of the Starkey Hearing Foundation's mission to provide 100 underprivileged kids in Clark County with free hearing aids on Saturday? Those hearing aids cost probably $2,500 each, so that's $500,000 in donated, customized equipment alone, but more importantly there were some amazing and heartbreaking stories there. But never fear, I volunteered and I'll be columnizing about that this week for the Las Vegas Weekly. Also, because I know someone at KSNV, they did this:

Show is UP!: Deux Chefs du Jour

This week's episode of "The Strip" is up. Click here to hear it or right-click here to download it to your computer, or click here to subscribe in iTunes. We're also now in the Zune directory as well.

On this week's program, find out why Kerry Simon left the Hard Rock and why the Cathouse had to close for a while (now reopened!) because of a structural concern. Simon opens his newest restaurant inside the Palms Place hotel-condo tower this month. Then, hear chef Charlie Trotter explain why he left the MGM Grand and is happier at the Palazzo. And both chefs answer our favorite chef question: What fast food do you eat?

In banter: Perez Hilton sucks, the Donnie and Marie idea sucks, a Hustler hotel-casino would suck and the broken Encore sign sucks. Also, news on Tamara.

Show links:

Kerry Simon’s website is here
Simon’s Cathouse is here and Simon at Palms Place is here
Charlie Trotter’s Las Vegas site is here
A CBS piece about the Chicago foie gras law is here
Steve’s USA Today piece on the Oprah-Tina-Cher event is here
Kerry Simon’s local favorite place, Go Raw, is here
VegasTripping.Com’s amusing take on Donnie and Marie is here
Steve’s post about the Perez Hilton rip-off is here
Richard Abowitz’s item about the Hustler idea is here
The Las Vegas Sun’s piece on Vegoose’s cancellation is here
Steve’s LVW column on Tamara is here

USAT on Tina-Oprah-Cher-Tom-Toilets

Look for my report on the Tina-Cher-Oprah show in tomorrow's USA Today. It's already up, so here's the link to it. Apologies in advance for the cliche headline; not my department.

Plaigarized by Perez Hilton?

So it looks like Perez Hilton found my post about Tina Turner going on tour of interest and repackaged it today. Except that he literally quoted from my prior blog post the part about "lolling about her Swiss home" without providing any credit or a link. He actually puts those words in Sophia Loren's mouth when, in fact, that was my paraphrase of what Tina explained.

Here's the screenshot below:


I'm happy to believe it was an oversight, but I've emailed Perez Hilton hours ago to both of the e-mail addresses I have for him reminding him that I was the one who brought him to Vegas for his first public appearance here and asking him for the courtesy of credit and a link.

So far, no response.

BREAKING: Tina Turner To Tour, Oprah Hearts the CP Toilet

I'm just in from the taping of the May 8 "Oprah Winfrey Show" at Caesars Palace where Tina Turner announced she's going back on tour at age 68 for the first time in eight years. Tickets go on sale on May 12 for a tour that kicks off from Kansas City on Oct. 1.

I must say, I'm a little confused about whether there was an embargo on that news. The woman who prepped the audience told the thousands who filled Cher's new performing home, Caesars Palace's Colosseum, not to tell anyone. But a group of us journalists were invited to attend -- including Robin Leach, the L.A. Times columnist/blogger Richard Abowitz and Review-Journal columnist Doug Elfman as well as the local CBS affiliate that airs "Oprah" -- and I was given no preconditions whatsoever.

So, that said, Tina's going on tour having been prodded, she said, by Sophia Loren to stop lolling about her Swiss home and go back to work. But first, Cher came out to perform "Take Me Home" in a shredded blue dress with a matching blue headpiece and about a dozen dancers in 1970s outfits including, unlike the all-female Bette show, a few male dancers. Later, Tina did "Nutbush City Limit" on her own and then the two divas -- Oprah, being Vegasy, called them "a pair of queens" -- shared the stage for a rousing (is there any other version?) "Proud Mary." Cher looked particularly fetching in a shiny red mini-dress and a long-straight-black-hair wig.

The "Oprah" show also includes some video of Cher with designer Bob Mackie showing a few of the 17 daring costumes she'll sport when she opens in Vegas on May 6. There's a body-length Indian headdress, something Cher refers to as "Cleopatra comes to Caesars Palace" and a "warrior goddess" look she'll don for the Pat Benatar classic "Love Is A Battlefield." Cher said the show will span her pre-Sonny career and include the Sonny & Cher tunes "It's The Little Things" and "The Beat Goes On" as well as a rendition of the Sammy Davis Jr. standard "I Gotta Be Me."

Cher also went on a bit about having dated Tom Cruise, which I hadn't heard but which has been out for a month or so and has a lot of online skeptics scratching their heads about when this could've been and how nobody would've known it until Cher said it. It's further baffling because Cher told Oprah about some incident where Cher and young Tom went to a restaurant in New York, I think, and some waitress turned out to be an old schoolmate of Tom's who, Tom told Cher, wouldn't have spoken to him back in the day. I suppose that's possible since Tom crew up in Syracuse, but kind of amazing nonetheless.

The most interesting stuff, though, was what Oprah rambled on about OFF CAMERA. First, she'd just come from visiting Tom Cruise's home in Telluride, Colo., where she rode on a snowmobile with him and spoke of his firm buttocks and how hot he was to grip as they took their spin. "You're like, 'Take me home, Tom,' " she enthused. There was no discussion of Suri or Katie, but someone shouted out from the audience something related to Cruise's infamous I-love-Katie meltdown because Oprah replied, "I didn't jump on his couch." Good to know. She said that episode airs May 2.

NOT as good to know, but perversely fascinating nonetheless, was Oprah's lengthy aside to the crowd about the high-tech toilets in her Caesars Palace suite. As it happens, the thing lifts the lid automatically when you enter the bathroom and, she explained in shocking detail, it is capable of washing and blow-drying your butt and other parts. "I swear, I gotta get one of these on the show and show everybody," she said. "I'm coming back here! I'm cleaned up AND cleaned out!"

I wondered what she was referring to, so I Googled "butt-cleaning toilet" and found this. There. We're done. Oprah, you need not ever speak of this again. In fact, please, please, please don't!

That said, quite a fun show. I was a little worried in the beginning when it seemed every Vegas cliche was coming into play -- "Viva Las Vegas" blared as the audience prepper came on, there was much to-do about the Tina and Cher impersonators in the audience and the prepper did lay that tired "What Happens in Vegas" line. Yes, she got it wrong. She must've read Christina Binkley's book.

Oprah, Tina and Cher, Oh My!

An astute reader alerted me to this notice on Oprah's site that she's filming a show with Cher and Tina Turner in Vegas on 4/26 -- presumably at the Colosseum? -- and is taking requests for studio tickets. It's interesting that she's doing Cher and TINA and not Cher and Bette, isn't it? I mean, what connection does Tina Turner presently have to Las Vegas? Hmmm... For that matter, when was the last time Oprah shot in Vegas? Anyone know?