Breaking: Liberace Museum Closing

This is actually a pretty big deal. The 31-year-old Liberace Museum is shutting down on Oct. 17 because of a decline in visitors, so the Liberace Foundation says it will focus specifically on its scholarship program. They say they're planning a national tour with some of the exhibit items.

That's an incredibly sad development. It adds to the list of museum closings in recent years and puts some fantastic relics of Old Vegas beyond the reach of the public, but it also eliminates a unique show space where singers from Strip shows have been enjoying creative outlets. They just redid the sound system in there, in fact.

Here's hoping someone on The Strip or downtown sees an opportunity in this. The museum is really well done -- years ago it was pure kitsch, but in the past decade it had improved to being well-curated kitsch -- and could be a serious attraction if tourists could walk to it instead of taking a bus, cab or rental car. Cancer-stricken actor Michael Douglas told USA Today just yesterday he's still committed to playing Liberace in a biopic opposite Matt Damon, and that could jumpstart public interest.

Maybe it could end up at the Tropicana alongside their mob exhibit, making for a retro-Vegas museum center?

LVW Col: Catch The Rising Stars

Here's this week's LVW column, a profile of sorts about Erich Bergen, who stars as Bob Gaudio in "Jersey Boys." I strongly recommend folks check out his one-man show at the Liberace Museum on 3/25 or 4/8. I'll be at the 4/8 performance.

Catch The Rising Stars
Some of the Strip's Broadway performers offer unique entertainment for locals

By STEVE FRIESS

Erich Bergen has one of those clean-cut young faces that make you want to pinch his cheeks and mess up his hair. He’s all wide-set doe eyes and perfect manners and collared shirts, albeit in various stages of wrinkled, and there’s this straitlaced, innocent element that makes the kid a natural to portray the square who wrote “Sherry” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You.”

That’s why I’m a little startled when I sit in the empty showroom at the Liberace Museum during a rehearsal last week for Bergen’s two-nights-only benefit concert and the stuff that’s streaming out of his mouth is naughtiness and double entendres of the most delightfully vile manner.

I won’t give it away, exactly, because Bergen asked me not to, but the Jersey Boys star himself is wondering if what he’s just sung will “make everyone walk right out, it’s so disgusting.”

God, I hope not. If they did, they’d miss an up-close-and-personal opportunity—at a bargain-basement price!—to spend some time with a talent so impressive, so refreshing that he can’t possibly be long for the obscurity of a Las Vegas Strip musical cast.

Star power is something that’s very difficult to explain or describe, and it is not that Bergen is the best singer, the best dancer, the best actor or the best-looking performer in this city. But what Bergen does have is a youthful and affable presence, an ability to play with audience expectations of him, a willingness to take risks and a confidence that does not—at least yet—come across as arrogance. And he has an eagerness to perform and crowd-please this city ought to appreciate and take advantage of for however long we have him here.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com.