It’s not Vegas until Liza Fromer arrives.
On Thursday night of last week, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority brought “the best Las Vegas has to offer” to a nightclub just off of King West. The “Vegas Forever” event – whose publicist emphasized to us beforehand, had “nothing to do with the casino issue here in Toronto” – was the flip side of the casino issue here in Toronto. After a year of being subjected to increasingly laughable pitches to construct a Vegas-style “integrated resort” in this city, we finally had the opportunity to encounter the side of the Vegas public relations industry that is focused on drawing people to Las Vegas. The actual Vegas, the one in the desert, the one whose Southern Ontario tourist base would (in theory) take a dip if an equivalent product were available here.
There would be “no affiliation whatsoever with local politics,” we were warned. “Any suggestion of a connection would be factually inaccurate.”
And while that was reasonably true on a literal level, the awkward mishmash of Vegas ambition and the humdrum reality of Toronto C-list glamour still offered a chilling glimpse of what a local “integrated resort” might look like.
Liza Fromer (of Global TV’s The Morning Show) and either Roz or Mocha (of Kiss 92’s Roz & Mocha) were the hosts. There was a guy wandering around who looked a bit like Moses Znaimer but probably wasn’t. The “tastes of Las Vegas” consisted of bite-sized servings of ceviche dispensed by servers who were swarmed the moment they emerged into view. The four available cocktails at the complimentary bar quickly shrunk to two, as the sponsor-furnished champagne had rapidly petered out.
And the attendees – mostly Global and Kiss 92 contest winners – appeared to be having experiences that ranged from okay to pretty good. But free booze will do that. (Casinos in Ontario are not allowed to dole out free booze.)
If sharing the same room as a regretful Shinan Govani was not enough to feel special, there was also a micro-performance from Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity.
Running in a 1,265-seat theatre at the New York-New York Hotel & Casino since 2003, Zumanity is by far the smallest show that Cirque has ever produced. (The 900-seat Cirque venue that forms part of the MGM Toronto scheme is closer in scale to Zumanity’s cabaret space than it is to anywhere else the company performs.)
And on this night, Zumanity was represented by exactly two performers – a singer and an acrobat – who managed to create a five-minute oasis of art and beauty amid what was otherwise a stilted celebration of stale cookies and thumping beats.
Able to create magic out of thin air, Cirque du Soleil is like Canada’s Pixar – if Pixar had spent years overextending itself with increasing output of decreasing quality and resorted to mass layoffs as a result. Unless you count this brief promotional presentation, 2013 is the first year since 2003 that Cirque is not touring to Toronto.
Satisfied that there would be no encore, and having finally tracked down one of the elusive sliders, I decided it was time to go. On my way out of the club, I was handed a ticket to Uniun’s Saturday night a lesser member of the Black Eyed Peas would be DJing.
CORRECTION (5/21/2013, 6:30 pm): This article originally stated that Zumanity is performed in a 400-seat venue. In fact, the Zumanity Theatre has an audience capacity of 1,265.
