Green can learn from Richie when they team up at Mandalay Bay

So a guy who should be a resident headliner on the Strip is going out on the road with an opening act who sort of tried that already. Will Cee Lo Green learn from the master, Lionel Richie?

Richie told Rolling Stone his extensive summer tour, “All the Hits All Night Long,” will be “back-to-back karaoke on steroids.”

But that’s a metaphor. Green’s show actually was karaoke.

Richie, who turns 65 on June 20, returns to Las Vegas for the first time since May 2012. That was when modern country stars lingered in town after the Academy of Country Music Awards to film the CBS special “Lionel Richie and Friends.”

Richie said he recorded that year’s country duets album “Tuskegee” with most of the guest stars in the studio with a live band, rather than digitally patching them together. “The believability of it is to get them to feel comfortable with the songs, as opposed to making it a Lionel Richie record,” he explained.

Last summer, Cee Lo Green rolled out a Las Vegas show called “Loberace,” which remembered the stripper nuns and the little-person Cee Lo impersonators, but forgot about the live band.

Green, who just turned 40, showed he had an old-school heart in an Auto-Tune world. But he hadn’t yet earned the right to ignore the basics and indulge in an eccentric showcase padded with unimaginative covers (“Super Freak” combined with “Le Freak”).

Watch from the wings and learn, Mr. Green. We want to see you both back in town more often.

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