Elvis & Eva have left the building

Two axes fell upon CityCenter in one day. It’s tough to decide which is more newsworthy. I’ll go with the Beso story because it has a not-so-hidden upside. Golden Nugget CEO Tilman Fertitta is feeling sufficiently bullish to plant his flag on the Strip. Since Tilman will be buying Beso out of bankruptcy, he’ll get it for cheap ($1 million) and he owns so many restaurant brands (with 300-plus manifestations) that he’s got millions of customers to whom he can market Beso … or whatever he’ll call it. The alliance of convenience between two Texas celebrities is already big news in the Lone Star State.

Longoria’s peeps can suppsedly shop Beso around but the likelihood of better offers appears slim and PR Newswire reports it’s a done deal. Since the restaurant’s cashbox is empty, management’s previous declarations of optimism have become “inoperative,” as Ron Ziegler would have put it. Since Fertitta is prepared to advance operational expenses to keep Beso open, manager William Braden would be wise to take Tilman’s money and run to the bank.

Soon-to-be-minority owner Eva Longoria will still be the face of Beso but, make no mistake, Fertitta (right) will call the shots. Inside the Nugget empire, it’s Tilman’s way or the highway. Creditors will be badly out of pocket and Crystals looks certain to take a mammoth writedown on Longoria’s back rent. At least it’s trading an insolvent tenant for a flush one, sparing it potential grief from other renters about Beso continuing to receive special indulgence. The Sun‘s Steve Green puts it none too delicately when he concludes by observing that Beso (and its Eve nightclub) now has real money at its back.

Unlike Longoria, Tilman’s more than just a pretty face. His vote of confidence in CityCenter is the most important such statement since Phil Ruffin decided to get back into the game.

Viva WHO? Las Vegans may have wondered why MGM Resorts International was scraping the butt-ugly Viva Elvis ad from the western face of Aria this week. Or maybe they were just relieved to be rid of that excrescence and figured it was better not to ask the reason why. Today, the Review-Journal‘s Norm (!) Clarke broke the news that Cirque du Soleil will be shutting down the much-panned, financially disappointing spectacle during 1Q12. It will return in an ill-defined incarnation that will be “less of a biographical representation.” Unfortunately, the most widely praised numbers in Viva Elvis tended to be those that had representational overtones (“Love Me Tender,” “Return to Sender,” etc.) and the relatively abstract numbers — like the interminable trampoline sequence — were mostly crap.

In its place there will be more standard-issue “Cirquetry” (™ Joe Brown). Since Cirque’s Zed troupe, over in Japan, has been forcibly idled in the wake of recent disasters, the gang in Montreal has decided to fold Zed into remnants of Viva Elvis. The reverse equation might be preferable, since subtracting The Pelvis from an Elvis-based show can hardly be construed as an improvement. (Trust me, Cirque is going to run into similar problems when it tries to build a show around the songbook of Michael Jackson, with its clear-cut narratives and concrete imagery.) While they’re at it, maybe Cirque can ditch the K-Tel LP jacket that passes for a logo.

Unfortunately, too many pratfalls have given Cirque brass thick noggins, which they’re going to continue pounding against the wall. Rather than just admit they laid an egg and replacing Viva Elvis, they’re going to keep attempting “fixations” of something that was fatally flawed from the conceptual stage. MGM CEO Jim Murren had the opportunity to smother this grotesque afterbirth in its cradle a year ago. However, the company’s inability to think outside its own box gives Cirque free rein to keep screwing around until, as with Criss Angel vanity vehicle Believe, they come up with something people don’t actively hate.

However you slice it, CityCenter is turning out far, far differently than envisioned. Tilman Fertitta’s middle-class customer base is hardly the chi-chi clientele Murren had in mind but, at this point, CityCenter literally can no longer afford to be persnickety.

Columbia Sussex has crashed and burned another hotel, this one in Massachusetts. ColSux’s Hilton Boston Woburn is running at sub-50% occupancy, considerably underperforming the market. If they operate it anything like they way they’ve mismanaged the Westin Casuarina, one can only paraphrase Marvin Hamlisch and say nobody does it worse. And to think people actually used to take ColSux seriously as a casino operator.

Seen on the Strip: We were having cocktails at tony Japonais (for research purposes, you understand) and saw a customer dressed in — I kid you not — a wife-beater, clamdiggers and flip-flops. You’d have to be Harry Belafonte to make that getup work and even he might have difficulty.