After sinking a reported $150 million into Cirque du Soleil‘s Zaia, Las Vegas Sands may find itself in possession of a very expensive “loss leader.” According to The Australian, “attendances [sic] have been poor and tickets have been heavily discounted.” Cirque doesn’t allow embedding of its online video but if the twee, ultra-PC storyline doesn’t put you off, icky-precious little Zaia herself might do it.
Meanwhile, just around the corner, Franco Dragone has whipped up a little opus called House of Dancing Water, which looks an awful lot like Le Reve 4.0 …
I guess Dragone’s going to keep staging that show until he gets it right and the news that he’s been tinkering with House since 2005 (i.e., when Wynn Las Vegas and original-recipe Le Reve opened) suggests a common ancestor. City of Dreams co-owner Lawrence Ho argues that Dragone’s show will do better since it draws specifically upon Chinese culture whereas Cirque’s aesthetic is — how do you say? — generique. He’d better be right, since House‘s budget makes the Zaia outlay look like pocket change.
Elsewhere in the story, a local academic insists Macao could become a major international tourist destination (even though visitor numbers continue to argue otherwise) and the hard reality of Macao’s low quality of life is on a collision course with the equally hard fact that the local labor pool is not remotely adequate to service the super-ambitious serious of construction projects the Macanese government has OK’d. (When casino push comes to governmental shove, expect Sands, Galaxy Entertainment and realism to ultimately prevail.) Oh, and Sheldon Adelson‘s pride and joy, the Cotai Strip™, is a landfill “chock full of household rubbish.” A casino empire built on a mountain of garbage? There’s a metaphor in there if you feel like digging for it.
Gentle encouragement? The City of Bethlehem is planning to plough $27 million in old Bethlehem Steel property taxes into infrastructure for Adelson’s Sands Bethlehem. More specifically, it’s to benefit the promised SteelStacks event center, upon which Sands has not turned so much as a spadeful of earth. So you might characterize the city’s decision as a nudge in Adelson’s ribs. The company has clearly not allayed fears that it will ultimately flip the unfinished, underperforming resort — not least because of Sands’ public equivocations on its future in Bethlehem.
New direction in NOLA. It’s not a cockamamie idea to market Harrah’s New Orleans as a national tourist destination but it’s a stretch nevertheless. Pushing it as an alternative to Atlantic City or Las Vegas ignores the fact that both of those cities have a critical mass of casinos that New Orleans can’t match. So does Biloxi, for that matter. Ergo, Harrah’s Entertainment pink-slipped Harrah’s New Orleans Casino & Hotel General Manager Jim Hoskins and replaced him with Dan Real, who vows to maintain more realistic ambitions. The main prongs of his new strategy are twofold: to restrict nationwide marketing to holiday periods, and to upgrade the quality and venue of entertainment being offered at Harrah’s N.O.
Musical chairs. The prospect of co-owning and running nine casinos was too great a prize for Lorenzo Creighton to resist, leading him to quit MGM Grand Detroit in favor of Canadian firm Gateway Casinos. MGM HQ in Vegas is dispatching marketing exec Steve Zanella to Motown to assume Creighton’s portfolio. S&G congratulates both men.
Also on the move is a former analyst for J.P. Morgan, Carlo Santarelli. He’s landed at Wells Fargo and initiated coverage on a baker’s dozen of gaming stocks. First out of the gate is Melco Crown Entertainment, which Santarelli currently likes for its “balanced risk[-]reward scenario” although he deems its 2011-12 cash flow projections “aggressive.” He takes a similar view of Melco’s pursuit of VIP play, and deems Sands and Wynn Resorts more stable long-term performers — a verdict that will come as a surprise to none.
