Another Day, Another Nifty Harrah's Idea

Harrah's is really having a banner week in my book, and I like to think I'm a tough one to impress. On Monday, they started taking guests with dogs at Caesars Palace, the Rio and the Imperial Palace. On Tuesday, the Paris announced they would be hosting a taping of "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" on Nov. 18.

And today, they may have revolutionized show-ticket buying. That's all.

Basically, they're applying the Buffet of Buffets concept to shows. If you buy one of their ALL STAGE passes for $99 (or $119 for non-Total Rewards members), you can go to as many of 17 Harrah's shows you want within the next 48-hour period. Here's the list:

• Jubilee! (7:30 p.m. & 10:30 p.m.)
• Human Nature (7:30 p.m.)
• Rita Rudner (8:30 p.m.)
• Matt Goss (10:00 p.m.)
• Mac King (1:00 & 3:00 p.m.)
• The Improv (8:30 p.m. & 10:30 p.m.)
• Legends in Concert (7:30 & 10:00 p.m.)
• Chippendales (8:00 p.m.)
• Divas Las Vegas (10:00 p.m.)
• Nathan Burton (4:00 p.m.)
• Matsuri (4:00 p.m.)
• Anthony Cools (9:00 p.m.)
• George Wallace (10:00 p.m.)
• X Burlesque (10:00 p.m.)
• Vinnie Favorito (8:00 p.m.)
• The Price is Right (2:30 & 7:30 p.m.)
• Dirk Arthur (7:00 p.m. & 9:00 p.m.)

Also, for $40 more per ticket, you can also see Cher, Donny & Marie, Barry Manilow and Penn & Teller.

One serious downside: You have to buy the thing at the Planet Hollywood box office. Then you go to the box office of the show you want to see and present your pass. You can't pick up your tickets more than two hours before the show.

The Planet Hollywood connection is a little confusing. Peepshow is not on this list owing, I suspect, to the fact that BASE Entertainment owns it and must not have been keen on this. But then why force everyone to go there? I mean, other than the obvious decision to route foot traffic there.

There's also a serious potential here for scalping, it would seem. For $99, you can get all these tickets and pop from one place to another reselling them to people on line or to pre-arranged customers and, potentially, make a lot more money. Also, if the passes don't have specific names on them, theoretically I could buy some and deliver them to customers who pay a premium for me to do so for them so they don't have to go to the P-Ho. I suspect there will be tweaks made to this program to work around that.

That said, if this works it presents the potential for terrific value for tourists.

I can only imagine what they'll be announcing on Thursday and Friday.

Vegas, Disabilities and the Hard of Hearing (Like Me!)

The Department of Justice today released information on a settlement with two casinos, the Mandalay Bay in Vegas and the Circus Circus in Mississippi, both now owned by MGM Mirage.

The settlements are exhaustive and the Vegas end of it involves Mandalay paying a $30,000 fine (whoop-de-doo) and enacting a long list of physical alterations to accommodate people in wheelchairs that undoubtedly will be a road map for compliance used by every other property in the city. Accessible rooms must have 32-inch-wide doorways, public bathrooms have to be however wide, they must provide accessible rooms for most every level of room style, etc. The Alain Ducasse eatery Mix was singled out as needing to provide a way for people in wheelchairs to get to upstairs dining areas. You can read it for yourself at this link until May 5.

So here's my complaint: What about those of us with disabilities not related to being unable to walk? In all of this, the only thing that touches on, say, people with hearing loss, is a requirement that they provide visual fire alarms in rooms.

I go to a lot of shows. I estimate fewer than a quarter of theaters on the Strip offer hearing assistive devices for their patrons. Every single cinema and Broadway theater does, but in Vegas, almost nobody bothers when they're spending tens of millions building them to include this convenience for their deaf and hard of hearing audience members. The theater that Rita Rudner was in -- and now Roseanne Barr is chilling in for a time -- at New York-New York was the first I ever saw that actually had signage for it, and I think the Cirque shows may have it which is ironic because you don't have to understand anybody's talking when you see one of them.

What's more, some that do have amplification devices don't advertise it. You have to ask. And then the ushers and box office personnel typically are baffled and don't know whether it's available or not. Nobody's training them. And I'm a young, assertive New Yorker/journalist; most of those looking for such things are elderly and not terribly comfortable even asking in the first place.

I particularly loved this response from an usher at the Gordie Brown show at the Venetian: "No, we don't have that, but it's really loud." It would be funny if I didn't hear this answer almost every time the answer turns out to be "no."

Don't tell me what's loud and what isn't. If I could hear like you, I wouldn't be asking, y'know?

Stomp: The Las Vegas Spectacular?

No matter what else I have to say about Planet Hollywood's "Stomp Out Loud," I have to give it props for having the coolest theater lobby in Vegas. Seriously. Just look at this stuff -- those letters are recycled from old Vegas marquees, that fountain made of a huge roulette wheel. Brilliant. And, by the way, totally free to look around at!

Now, on to the commentary...

By now we're all familiar with this story: A show takes New York or London or some place else by storm and then eventually finds itself a home in Las Vegas. And usually, as long as it's not a traditional Broadway musical, it usually does turn out successfully. Well, it worked for Cirque du Soleil, Blue Man Group and Mamma Mia. Not so well for some others that need not be named.

So here comes another, Stomp. Or, as they redubbed it, Stomp Out Loud. A cast of multiethnic performers, many of them physically unlikely to have become stage actors, make percussion music with a variety of household items. Brooms, water bottles, boxes, garbage cans.

It was impossible not compare Stomp to the Blue Man Group, a show I adore and, for some reason, can watch again and again without boredom. I enjoyed Stomp, just a little less and with no desire to return. And that's strange because intellectually I knew that what I saw in Stomp was more challenging. In BMG, they're backed up by a full band. They have lengthy sections of humor that have nothing to do with music. And they use those blue masks as a means of separating themselves from us normal humans in the audience.

In Stomp, all of the sound comes from a cast of real, uncostumed people on stage, each of whom gets their own character to act out without ever uttering a word. And, most of all, the brilliance of Stomp isn't actually the notion of making the music but the astounding feat of coordinating all of those people -- sometimes 15 at one time -- to make their peculiar noises in a way that is visually appealing and makes sense aurally. As I said, BMG has only three guys to coordinate.

Stomp Out Loud was great fun -- for the first hour. And then, spoiled audience member that I am, I got used to watching incredibly difficult feats and thought, 'What else ya got?'

And here's where it gets a little tricky. My companion for the night, Trevor, had seen Stomp twice before elsewhere. And he tells me this version was more than 60 percent the same as what he'd seen before. And that's a problem for Las Vegas. Just ask the folks at "Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular," who wisely realized they'd need to do something truly sensational to make it Vegas-worthy, so they built a $40 million theater and reinvented the chandelier-crash as a thrill ride of sorts.

Stomp had some new things -- live showers on the stage that provide for an intriguing and sexy sequence with some new sounds, a mammoth roulette wheel on the back wall that twirled and lit up -- but is it new enough to make people want to shell out $50 to $110 here?

Maybe. I'll let that question just hang out there. I was wrong four years ago about Mamma Mia, which I didn't think had a chance. And I thought "Avenue Q" would catch on. So all I'll say is that if you've never seen it before, this "Stomp" is worthy. And did I mention that the lobby is really amazing?