No need for frills, or reinvention, with Strait

Everything changed. And nothing.

Last week's hullabaloo over George Strait playing at least four Las Vegas arena concerts next year got me wondering: Has any other superstar kept getting more and more popular over the years without doing one thing different?

If "reinvention" is the overused buzzword (Thank you, Madonna), what's the opposite of that? Standing still? Being where people can find you?

Strait made the jump to arenas and then stadiums at some point, but always looking and sounding just the same, singing his honky-tonk ballads and subtly updating country subgenres such as Western swing for modern ears.

This was all driven home before I covered last week's ceremonies, which included a few rare meet-the-press words from the man himself. I dug into file cabinets containing yellowed Review-Journal clips from the 1980s to see if Strait's early Las Vegas career had been covered.

Lo and behold, there was a review of Strait playing to about 3,200 people at the old Convention Center in December 1985. The photo showed a much-younger guy than the singer at 63, but the description read much like Strait's past decade of MGM Grand arena concerts (given that the hits just kept coming, and coming).

Who else from mid-'80s Vegas got more popular by standing still? Cher? Maybe, but she had cycles of popularity in terms of radio hits. Jeff Dunham? Not until he tapped the public zeitgeist with the Achmed bit. The closest parallel may be Tony Bennett, whose canny manager-son, Danny, led the MTV crowd to him in the '90s, making them realize their grunge lives were lacking some class.

I had the old yellow clip in my computer bag and decided it would be fun to show it to Strait as an ice-breaker. I figured he would laugh at the photo and move on, but he started to read the copy — "A no-frills show ..." he read out loud — and seemed like he would have read the whole thing if the clock wasn't ticking on five minutes of allotted time.

As the clock ran out, I asked if he had come to terms with his enduring popularity or if it still surprised him.

"That always surprises me, the things that I've been able to do." Then he pointed to the old yellow clip. "It says it all right here, 'No frills.'" ...

NBC once had one of the most memorable slogans of all time for its summer reruns: "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you."

Maybe the network should dust that off for "America's Got Talent." You always get the idea the youngish studio audience is seeing its first magician or acrobat ever.

But this year's winner, British ventriloquist Paul Zerdin, sparked a complicated debate over what is fair use and what is theft in the small world of ventriloquism.

"There's a lot of theft in my business. You just have to learn to take a punch and roll with it," says veteran Ronn Lucas, who has had resident shows at the Rio and Excalibur. "I watch what (Zerdin) does and he's very skillful ... but it seems like everything he's got is derivative of other people's hard work."

"I don't think it was fair to the other competitors, who were coming to the table with original stuff."

Lucas says he was the first ventriloquist, back in 1989, to make an audience-participation bit out of putting a cable-controlled mask on a patron, as Zerdin did with judge Howie Mandel on the show.

Terry Fator uses the mask in his show at The Mirage and paid Lucas for the rights to it. "A lot of legal people said that was not necessary, but Ronn's a friend of mine," he said.

But Fator also sticks up for Zerdin, after performing with him on the "Talent" season finale, before it was announced that Zerdin was the big winner.

"You don't just hold onto a bit for 30 years," Fator says. "If you did something 30 years ago, you should not be considering that your original material anymore ... that's practically public domain. You should have something new."

Lucas doesn't think that logic would hold up in the legal system. But he does envy the world of magic. "If you come up with an original idea, the first thing you do is publish it, and then people buy the method from you ... .

"Ventriloquism should really learn from that. We've been, over the past 100 years, borrowing and stealing and justifying it."

Zerdin will perform at Planet Hollywood with other "Talent" finalists Oct. 22-24.

Fator has been doing an old-Vegas thing and showing up in The Pub at Monte Carlo without his puppets, singing with his friend Pete Mitchell about once a month. "Man, I really miss just singing," he says. "Just getting up and singing a song."

He just did it this week; we'll try to give you a better heads-up for the next one.

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