59°F
weather icon Clear

With ‘Spoofical,’ producer Saxe bites the hand that fed his career

David Saxe greets a visitor from the front row of the theater: “Watch out, pingpong balls are gonna shoot.”

False alarm, sort of. The air-powered, ball-firing hose seems petulant, not wanting to work at all and then blasting a ball nearly to the back of the house.

It’s less than four hours until the first scheduled show of “Spoofical the Musical.” But it was a premiere that was only sort of, kind of on sale anyway; if someone showed up to buy a ticket, they were waved in free. Good thing, as the slowdowns continue until Saxe declares over his microphone, “Just a reminder, there’s a dress rehearsal tonight at 7 o’clock.”

“I’m scared,” he says. But he’s smiling big when he says it, and he isn’t talking about the nagging technical challenges — the music edits, the projected video backdrops — which prove the devil is indeed in the details.

No, Saxe is happy-scared, because “this show is really (messed) up.”

“Spoofical,” a blend of blackouts, song parodies and fully costumed sketch comedy, is the raunchiest and most acerbic show anyone’s tried in the tourist corridor in a while, at least in terms of a produced show with a cast versus stand-up comedy.

The pingpong balls? Go ask your dad. We can’t elaborate much here, beyond Saxe telling us this finale involves “a Circus-Circus act,” and the extra layer of humor is “they think they’re a legit act.”

The real heresy may be the show mocking the rest of Las Vegas, from rewriting the Petula Clark hit “Downtown” to painting Fremont Street as a deviant freak show, or a Jabbawockeez commercial where “each number is totally different!” (and it’s not).

Then again, the Jabbawockeez end up in a dance-off with Jabba (the Hutt) and a Wookie, so the end product’s bite might be negated by its silliness.

Saxe won’t know for a while, as the plan is to test a new segment every night, until all 60 or so get a chance to fly or die in front of audiences in a show with room for about 30 bits.

“I literally have three hours’ worth of material,” Saxe says. “I didn’t know I was writing that much. I just got excited.”

Saxe hasn’t been this excited about a show since, well, his “Zombie Burlesque,” which debuted in late 2013 in the same 199-seat room inside the V Theater he operates in the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood.

That one — also with longtime director-choreography partner Tiger Martina — turned the corner from Saxe’s earlier productions, “V — The Ultimate Variety Show” and “Vegas! The Show,” to break from easily described categories and perhaps tap into a new demographic of ticket-buyers.

“Zombie” caught on, so “Spoofical” pushes even further. It works in a bunch of saved-up ideas — “all the stuff we would say as a joke” — from the producer’s years of presenting material designed to be a safe sale to tourists.

Now there’s a giant foam penis costume. And the “Downtown” number includes a zip-liner who makes “tea bag” into a verb. But the producer points out there are no F-bombs.

“I swear I didn’t do it just for shock value. There’s a rhyme and reason for everything,” he says. “It sounds like I’m writing some perverted, nasty show. But think of ‘Book of Mormon,’ where all the raunchy humor is in a context.

And the same show that spoof’s Roy Horn’s tiger dragging him from the stage also makes room for a Sonny and Cher spoof dating back to Saxe’s earliest days as a producer, when he took over “Showgirls of Magic” from his mother, Bonnie Saxe, in 2001.

If you have to know the rules in order to break them, safe to say Saxe didn’t have to do any research to come up with the ’70s-cheesy opening number: “It’s gotta have that Jack Jones ‘Love Boat’ sound. I showed the drummer how to do the backbeat,” he notes.

“I’ve really enjoyed watching him grow up; it’s amazing,” says comedy magician and female impersonator Steve Daly, aka “Tiny Bubbles,” who, now as before, is the Cher half of the duet with Jordan Cline.

Daly remembers the producer as the little brother of Melinda Saxe, aka “Melinda, the First Lady of Magic,” tearing tickets, selling souvenir photos, running the sound and even live-drumming along to the recorded soundtrack of her little show at the bygone Landmark and Bourbon Street hotels in the 1980s.

“He’s truly paid his dues. He’s done all the grunt work,” Daly says. And now, “He’s opening up his own pathway … . He truly understands to zig when everyone else zags.”

“He never says no. It’s like, ‘Let’s try this, let’s do this, let’s push ahead,’ ” says Pat Caddick, musical director for this show’s three-piece band, as well as for “Zombie” and “Vegas!”

“And nobody builds shows here anymore,” Caddick notes. “He opens shows, and he doesn’t close shows.”

They don’t open easily, though. “He’s been working on this for, I’m gonna say six months, and he called me 10 days ago,” Caddick says with a laugh.

But that’s just as well given the nature of this one. “So much will change,” Caddick says. As they did on “Zombie,” “we’ll start forming it and molding it, and chopping stuff out and adding stuff in, and eventually it is a show.”

Eventually. After Janien Valentine’s vocals are inaudible on a “Downtown” run-through, Caddick reminds everyone, “this is a comedy slash musical. If the music is too loud, the rest of it is ruined.”

At least the comedy part keeps everyone in perspective. “These are just jokes,” Saxe reminds the crew at one point. “It’s not a musical.”

And that evening’s official first performance? “Everything went wrong,” he later reports. The cast was laughing so hard they were in tears.

Now it’s time to get paying customers to do the same.

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.

Don't miss the big stories. Like us on Facebook.
THE LATEST
Top 10 things to do in Las Vegas this week

St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, beer festivals and concerts by Twice and Jodeci lead this week’s lineup in Las Vegas.