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Poor attendance has forced performer Robert Goulet to pull the plug in his summer stint at The Venetian.
Photo by Jeff Scheid.
| Wednesday, July 25, 2001
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal Goulet drops curtain on Venetian show By MIKE WEATHERFORD
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Robert Goulet pulled the plug Tuesday on a rent-the-room summer stint at the Showroom at The Venetian, saying he "just can't keep pouring money" into the $15,000 nightly rental. "We paid (showroom management) everything we could. We're running out of money here," Goulet said Tuesday afternoon, after the showroom withheld box-office receipts. Rogo & Rove, the company headed by the singer and his business-manager wife Vera, was dealing with an overhead of $200,000 per week, which would have been break-even with 50 percent attendance, Goulet said. However, after four weeks of a nine-week run, attendance averages were more in the 35 percent to 40 percent range. Goulet said he should have "waited until September when the audiences and conventions will be here. But we made a mistake and were told it's OK to open in July. And of course it wasn't." The showroom is not a hotel operation. It is run by H&H of Nevada, which has a master lease on the space and rents the venue to show producers. "Every time we've done one of these deals, we get money upfront. The run only goes for as long as you give us money," said H&H partner Scott Iwamoto. Iwamoto said he tried to be sympathetic to the fact that the Goulets' key investor backed out just before the show's July 3 opening. "We let them start rehearsals without having come up with the money." "(Vera Goulet) had hopes of getting another investor and being able to pull this thing off, but we weren't paid," Iwamoto said. "The only thing we can do is keep box-office receipts. They weren't sufficient for the room rental." "Robert is a world-class performer," Iwamoto added, "and we'd still welcome him back." Goulet said he offered to "lay low and come back in September," when hotel traffic returns to The Venetian, but Iwamoto refused. Iwamoto said he "never had that discussion. Nobody's ever talked to me about coming back in September."
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