The bigger-than-ever loser; Shania’s rump rocks Vegas

If Sheldon Adelson played the ponies as he does politics, he’d enter a Shetland in the Kentucky Derby and put all his money on it to win. What could be better than knowing the Las Vegas Sands CEO blew $100 million trying to buy the White House and a sizable tranche of Capitol Hill in the last election cycle? Learning that it was actually more like $150 million Sheldonbucks that went down the toilet. Yes, it cost Adelson a pretty penny to learn that American democracy doesn’t come as cheaply as, say, Macanese legislator Leonel Alves. The latter saw nothing wrong with being on both the Macao government’s payroll and that of Sands China, to the tune of 700,000 smackeroos. Neither did Adelson’s minions, which is one of the reasons the Department of Justice has taken an interest in the Doge of Vegas.

In a hilariously, characteristically Adelsonian form of megalomania, the mogul is reported to have attempted to purchase the 2012 election largely in a fit of pique because “he didn’t like the way he felt treated by [federal] prosecutors.” They don’t get paid to be nice, Shel, they’re paid to get convictions. (Adelson’s snit, incidentally, is yet another reminder of the dangers of surrounding oneself with sycophants.) This week finds the CEO in Washington, D.C. Having cut loose his front man to celebrate Thanksgiving with some Boston Market takeout — sic transit gloria mundi — Adelson is taking his case to lawmakers directly. What he wants is a loosening of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which frowns upon bribery. Does this mean Sheldon takes a “liberal” stance when it comes to the greasing of overseas palms?

A spate of illnesses having rendered the McKee household hors de combat, we weren’t able to look in on Shania Twain‘s Dec. 1 kickoff performance of her Caesars Palace jamboree, Still the One. As Twainology goes, all I know is that she’s Canadian, used to show her belly button a lot and had a bizarre martial switcheroo, as dished by Elton John in the course of his Caesars show. But while the debut of Zarkana fell into the “blink and you’ve missed it category,” there was no avoiding the media stampede to cover Ms. Twain’s coronation as a Strip headliner. The Las Vegas Review-Journal had no fewer than seven news stories and a slide show in the fortnight leading up to her opening.

The show itself drew reviews both local and national, and the reaction was generally the same: Mostly gobsmacked with scattered puzzlement. But whether it was the R-J‘s generally steady Mike Weatherford or the New York Times‘ philosophical Jon Carmanica, the bottom line was the same: Resistance is futile. And I do mean “bottom line,” as no reportage of opening night has been complete without mention of Twain’s butt-hugging catsuit, already the stuff of Vegas showbiz lore. Twain’s sister, Carrie Ann Brown, fared less well in the fashion department. Snarked one local magazine editor, “Shania talks her sister into being in the show then outfits her in the ugliest grey poncho ever.”

“Twain and her collaborators seem to realize the singer is a lot of things to a lot of people, but none of them involve a sacred artistic vision,” writes Weatherford. “She’s a blank canvas, really.” He thinks director Raj Kapoor‘s something-for-everyone “kitschy spectacle” is what the doctor ordered. Carmanica opens by positing (rightly) that the Strip is no longer where you go when you’re put out to pasture but “a confirmation of cultural saturation.” The NYT scribe expressed qualms that Still the One was occasionally “merely flashy and energetic,” and that maybe there weren’t enough oats amid them thar sequins. (There’s better be, as the show employs two horses.) But he allowed that “A Las Vegas revue is in theory a hypertrophied, theatrical take on an artist’s past, but when you have achieved what Ms. Twain has, and in sometimes gauche but always grand fashion, a show like this can only seem temperate by comparison.”

One other point of consensus: The instrumentalists, backup singers, backing tracks, whatever tend to overpower Twain’s long-in-repair voice. It would be far from the first time one’s gone to a Vegas show and wanted to yell, “Turn the damn band down!” Must they always ‘go to 11’?

Musical chairs at the Plaza. It took more than a year to do it, but Tamares Group‘s flagship property finally has a full deck of programming for its much-underemployed showroom. The additions, substractions and alternations are so dizzying to explain that I’ll let John Katsilometes do it instead. That’s why he gets paid the big bucks.