“Soul” too soulless?; The Sunshine Boys

One weekend down, nine to go. Bear that in mind if you simply must see Faith Hill and Tim McGraw play The Venetian. The clock’s a tickin’. Since my knowledge of the McGraw-Hill oeuvre (separately and together) consists of the intro to Sunday Night Football, I will defer to Mike Weatherford‘s review which strikes me as definitive. Although Hill got points with me for covering Simon & Garfunkel and Janis Joplin, McGraw’s voice was not only the more powerful but greater in range and considerably more varied of nuance. McGraw was also the only one of the two to prevail with any consistency over the thick sonic impasto that passed for a sound mix at the ex-Phantom of the Opera theater. (OK, so we know one thing the room isn’t good for now: rock concerts.)

Also, Ridley Scott called; he wants his set back. Seriously, it resembles the innards of a spaceship and, at one point, it looks like Ms. Hill was about to be sucked into an unstable wormhole. Audience members reacted to the duo as though it were the second coming of Christ, so this should be a most remunerative stint for both the artists and Las Vegas Sands alike.

Tell me something I already know. Rather than let Bill Lerner of Union Gaming Group have all the fun, Colliers International has gotten into the gaming-analyst action, having raided CB Richard Ellis to pump up its brain trust. Top boffin Mike Mixer, and colleagues Josh Smith and Gabriel Telles really put the “anal” in analyst, judging by the epic amount of sunshine they blow up Vegas Inc.’s butt. Their predictions cobble together unrelated events and old news, pasted up with a lot of wishful thinking. Their boldest forecast is that somebody will buy (and assume the multi-billion-dollar completion cost) of Fontainebleau around 2014-15. Also, solo operators may be engorged by the maw of Penn National Gaming‘s shiny new REIT.

Colliers’ motives are not the purest, as it’s been peddling some duff real estate, including the former Key Largo, the Castaways site and the upper-Beltway land where Station Casinos once attempted to build “Losee Station.” So the question is: Would you buy a used casino from these men?

P.S.: The next time Steve Wynn tries to tell you about that great project he was going to execute on behalf of El-Ad Properties on the New Frontier site, remind yourself that El-Ad just lost the acreage to foreclosure. Would Wynn really get into bed with a company that can’t make its interest payments? Did the sun rise in the west today?