Friday, February 04, 2005 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

SHOW REVIEW: Bye-Bye Broadway

'Chippendales: The Show' tried to class up its act, but preview audiences just wanted the skin

Hold those phone calls: The men of Chippendales wear flesh-tone skivvies in this number that's part of the new revue taking full advantage of a custom venue at the Rio. Photo by Jeff Scheid.

Like its individual dancers, the new "Chippendales: The Show" has dressed up in order to dress down.

Think of a tuxedo being peeled to a G-string, and you get the idea of how the revue classed up its production values while still giving women the gluteus maximus they scream for.

Creating the right balance didn't turn out to be easy, though. Turns out that "art versus commerce" tensions on the Strip aren't unique to girlie shows.

The word "Broadway" was used a lot to describe Chippendales' cross-casino move from the Scinta Showroom to its new home at the Rio's $7 million Ultimate Girls' Night Out complex. You know, less sweat, more fantasy. But preview audiences last month thought director Brian Thomas succeeded too well.

When the energy drained from the room like so many people headed for a restroom, Broadway went bye-bye. A 1930s Chicago gangster bit now wastes only a minute or two in getting featured dancer Steve Kim down to his tighty whities and on top of a table.

The primal needs of a bachelorette night also help explain why many of the changes in the 14-man revue really boil down to upgraded staging.

When the guys do their construction-worker thing, they climb real scaffolding to shoot phallic sparks from their, uhm, welder's torches. A jungle segment now has real jungle drums on each side of the audience.

And when the guys pull women from the audience onstage for a game show parody, the set reinforces it with a '60s-mod visual spoof of "The Dating Game."

Like much of the revue, putting Jeff Beech into a really bad powder-blue tux as the game show host is a detail you can appreciate or ignore. It doesn't get in the way of an audience recruit doing her "best animalistic mating call" for Beech, or demonstrating her best sexual position for a dancer.

The new staging makes room for a couple of back-flipping acrobats and one of those fabric acts you also see in the girlie shows, where someone climbs and falls while wrapped in long swaths of linen.

Amid the expected cowboy and military numbers, a few novel twists managed to survive the previews. The biggest laugh-out-loud moment has the guys lip-syncing to their own bizarro-world rendition of "Hey Big Spender" from "Sweet Charity."

But it's not like they got them into fishnets and heels. And just to make sure the song's innuendo isn't lost on drunken bachelorette parties, the lyric "Would you like to have fun ... fun ... fun!" is changed to "sex ... sex ... sex!"

Subtlety has its limits.

Despite the audience feedback, the new edition of Chippendales still seems less graphic and sleazy than its predecessor. On the balance, there doesn't seem to be as much bare butt-twitching and self-fondling, and those moments now tend to happen right before blackouts or scene changes.

Whether this is good or bad is a matter of individual tastes. Women at last week's debut gala were divided in their opinions of whether it was too tame or too much, a sign that the show is probably landing close enough to a democratic middle.

Two things at least are pretty hard to argue. First, the room and show work well together in the way that Las Vegas is uniquely equipped to offer with customized productions. Unless you pop for the "sky boxes" upstairs, groups of women are denied the right to compare notes by being packed into straight rows of folding chairs. But the trade-off is the stage's larger-than-life perspective, aided by four deeply vertical panels sliding into different configurations for video projections.

Second, the energetic ensemble isn't going to be upstaged by its surroundings. Paced by singer Bryan Cheatham, the guys act like they are racing against their 75-minute clock, and they dive into the audience with a gusto you definitely don't see in the cooly unattainable "La Femme" babes.

The director and the Rio may aspire to having Chippendales be more than just a cheap thrill. But the guys don't seem to mind at all.