Still touring after all these years

It's a mellow summer night with the family, watching the old MGM musical "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." Gene Kelly breaks into this Irish jig and I break into a cold sweat.

It's a cold-slap reminder: "Lord of the Dance" is coming back to town. So I gotta go.

Do the same job long enough and this stuff happens. Reviewers should walk into every show with an open mind, but baggage builds up.

I thought we'd shoveled the last dirt on the Michael Flatley step-dancing showcase (which he doesn't perform in) at The Venetian in the summer of 2003.

But now it's back for a limited run, as irksome a relic of the '90s as Limp Bizkit, or Gordie Brown imitating Forrest Gump.

I know. Don't whine. It still beats working, and too many Las Vegans aren't right now.

But it's sticky. I get along fine with Bob Cayne, whose Global Entertainment tours "Lord" all over the world, as long as the show is somewhere else.

We decided to confront the elephant in the room and read over my old reviews, allowing him to respond.

In 2000, I claimed surprise that "Lord" stayed at New York-New York long enough to celebrate two years.

"This show's still touring after 12 years," Cayne says with a "Gotcha" voice. "But you did say it was 'durable,' which I liked. The brand has longevity -- not to any of our surprise."

Touche.

What about the goofy costumes and plot? I wrote that the show combines "Andrew Lloyd Webber and other populist PBS fare with another hit TV offering: 'WWF Smackdown!' "

Cayne laughs, but then adds, "You know what the worst thing about that was? That made it into your (show listings) paragraph in Neon for about nine years."

Cayne laughs even harder at another theory: That blinding explosions serve to wake the crowd up from the lull of the repetitive music. Or, as I described it in 2003, "Deedly-didely, deedly-didely, deedly-didely ... Ka-BLAM!"

"I'm just gonna say, 'To each their own,' " he says. "The pyro intensifies the excitement of what the dancers are creating onstage."

He is less amused at my biggest beef: That the show sounds "foot-synced" to recorded tapping and clopping. He falls back on the company line: "We can confirm that we do not use recorded taps."

But the wording does not deny percussion that might match up to the footwork. "It's not about the taps. It's about the visual. It's the synchronization of the dancers that creates the spectacle," he says.

"Lord" used to amplify the live footwork and it didn't sound good, he adds. "It's a fact that '42nd Street' and 'Billy Elliot' use similar things in parts of their show."

"Nobody can ever remember a complaint. It's only you, Mike."

To which I can only say, "Guilty."

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.