Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919-1987) debuted in Las Vegas in 1944 at the Last Frontier. His opening night was such a success that entertainment director Maxine Lewis tore up his contract and doubled his salary on the spot. Liberace would be a fixture of the Last Frontier for the next decade. He then transferred his allegiance to the Riviera, where he was the inaugural headliner. So great had his celebrity become that the gig netted him $50,000 a week. (He had only been offered $750 a week by the Last Frontier, although even that was a big step up from his going rate of $350 and, as referenced above, the Last Frontier had quickly upped him to $1,500 a week.) In 1972, his loyalty shifted to the Las Vegas Hilton, where his 1978-79 run provided the fodder for his CBS-TV specials. "I don't give concerts, I put on a show," as he's quoted as having described his flamboyant performances.
Liberace’s final Vegas engagement was a two-week stand at Caesars Palace in 1986. Later that year, on November 2, he performed what would be his final stage show at New York's Radio City Music Hall. He died at his winter home in Palms Springs on February 4, 1987, of pneumonia due to complications from HIV.
In late 2014 it was announced that the Liberace Foundation had given its blessing to a virtual-Liberace show in which the entertainer would not only be recreated holographically, but would interact with the audience. Actual Liberace artifacts would be part of the show, which was to debut at an unspecified Las Vegas casino and then ‘go wide’ across the country. Foundation Chairman Jonathan Warren said the show’s creator "understands what Liberace was about and [is] vested in his legacy. Earnings will help us find and fund a new talent just waiting to be discovered." Warren said in a prepared statement, "You’ll feel the warmth from his heart, the sparkle of his eye and the pure lightning from his fingertips."
The show would actually rely on a 19th illusionist technique known as "Pepper’s Ghost," in which the digital Liberace would be projected onto a sheet of glass between the audience and the stage. However, after much initial hubbub, the story quickly faded from the headlines.
Hologram USA, the talent behind the Tupac Shakur hologram at Coachella and Jimmy Kimmel’s live transmission of himself into a Nashville theater, seems to have pushed "Lee" onto a back burner. Its top-priority project for 2016 is a virtual Whitney Houston. LVA polled its readers about the concept of a Liberace-hologram show and got a mostly negative response. (An attempt by Hologram USA boss Alki David to digitally recreate Amy Winehouse was dismissed by the late singer’s father as "utter rubbish.")
Frankly, we’re dubious that the Liberace show will materialize, so to speak, and are even more doubtful that a large enough audience exists to sustain it, even as an only-in-Vegas phenomenon, let alone a nationwide attraction. Aside from the technical difficulty of creating an evening-length show, the question remains as to whether there are enough Liberace fans out there -- especially as Liberace was already hopelessly out of fashion at the time of his death in 1987. The Liberace Museum has been closed for five years and shows no sign of finding a new home, although some of its artifacts graced a "pop-up" exhibition at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas in 2014.
Pop group One Direction has cited Liberace as an idol, so maybe the teenyboppers of today will be the Liberace fans of tomorrow, but somehow we doubt it. In the meantime, same-sex couples can tie the knot with the "Liberace Wedding Package" at the Gay Chapel of Las Vegas, where a "Lee" impersonator tickles the ivories as you walk down the aisle.
