VegasChatter

Generally speaking, it’s still the same. There’s no plot as such (something that caused consternation in the VTS camp when we said it before) – instead, it starts off in the Neon Boneyard with Eric Jordan Young summoning the ghosts of Vegas greats from their sparkly graves. Then it’s basically a showcase of Sin City’s musical history, taking in the usual suspects: Sinatra, Elvis, Sonny and Cher, Gladys Knight and the rest.

And, as we said before, we love the fact that there’s no spurious plot. We love getting a history lesson through a show. And we love that it’s neither a dodgy impersonator show nor a crappy lounge act – instead, the performers do their own renditions of the famous songs (which is just as well, since the wunderbar Tom Lowe is a bit blond and a bit British to actually look like Elvis).

It’s fun. It’d also, we’d imagine, be good for families. A family show that we actually like: bizarre.

Things that don’t work: Liberace, who’s done as a puppet with a recorded background, is both incongruous and weird. Ditto the magician who comes out and does stuff with a parrot. We love freaky Vegas probably more than the average, but if we want to see a magic show, we’d rather go see Copperfield looking hot disappear a car than have a two minute interlude here. Also, we found the dancers throwing candy at the audience during Candyman a bit cringy, but we may just be jealous because we didn’t catch any.

An interlude that does work, though – the tap-dancing twins off of America’s Got Talent, Sean and John Scott. We may have been plied with a free drink or three before the show, but they were amazeballs.

Other stand out members of the cast: the ace Tom Lowe, natch (he’s currently top of our male Vegas singer leaderboard), dancer Tara Palsha who blazed up the stage in a green dress dancing to Luck Be a Lady, and the female lead, Reva Rice. The band, too – how nice is it to a) have a live band and b) make them visible and part of the show? (Answer: very.)

The upshot? If you’re not into music shows, as a friend of ours isn’t, you might be bored (although you could probably quite happily spend the time ogling the dancers). If you need your show to be accompanied by an idiotic needless Cirque-style plot device, then it might feel a bit bare at first. But otherwise, you’ll probably love it. And if you like Vegas bling and Vegas cheese, you’ll be smitten.

In fact, we only realized quite how much we liked it when we saw LOVE on Saturday night and were underwhelmed by the dancing in the opening scenes, and found ourselves thinking, why, these British stereotypes are borderline offensive hmm, VTS would be more entertaining than this right now.

David "there’s more to Vegas than Cirque" Saxe would have been proud of us.

Tickets start at $79.99 but follow their Twitter account, because they're always posting discounts on there.

Disclosure: we saw the show on opening night when tickets were free. But all the love comes straight from our cheese-loving heart.