You’ve heard the hype. The 20,000-seat T-Mobile Arena will draw better shows, bigger convention groups and maybe even an NHL team. Fittingly, the copper-clad arena adjacent to New York-New York and the Monte Carlo is an in-the-moment, Vegas-style showplace, which demands more than just seats with good sightlines and a solid lineup of shows: It combines luxe with modern hospitality. The arena’s 44 luxury suites, burgers from Shake Shack, dedicated VIP entrances and, yes, paid parking, make it a venue that could only have been born in post-recession Las Vegas.
The arena opened April 6, with a consciously Vegas-flavored show: hometown heroes the Killers, along with special guests Wayne “Mr. Las Vegas” Newton and North Las Vegas’ Shamir. Guns N’ Roses with Alice in Chains, the Harlem Globetrotters, George Strait, Billy Joel and a Canelo Alvarez vs. Amir Khan WBC middleweight title bout will see the arena through the rest of its first month of operation. The mix of popular entertainment with a Vegas mainstay—championship boxing—is a good indicator of the arena’s baseline offerings.
This being Las Vegas, you’ve already heard a fair number of superlatives about the $375 million, privately financed arena. It may help achieve what was once thought impossible: bringing a major league sports franchise to the desert. Even if it doesn’t snag an NHL or NBA team, supporters assure us it’s going to boost Las Vegas entertainment to heights we couldn’t have imagined.
That’s a bold claim, but looking at how Strip entertainment venues have grown over the past 80 years, it’s probably not an exaggeration.
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Entertainment on the Strip started before that stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard even got its name.
The first resort on what would become the Strip, El Rancho Vegas opened in April 1941 with the Round-Up Room, a casually Western dinner theater, as its centerpiece. The timber-roofed restaurant didn’t have a raised stage. A corral-style fence demarcated the cramped bandstand, with a dance floor cleared in front of the performance space, ringed by tables. It was a tight squeeze for the chorus line, musicians and headliners, but they somehow pulled it off.
The tiny (by today’s standards) room had a certain homey charm. “For Entertainment Fine Food and a Dance/It’s the Round-up Room for Romance” advertised a promotional postcard. A diverse set of stars—from Zero Mostel to Sophie Tucker to Lili St. Cyr and back again to Joe E. Lewis—performed there. In 1951, the room’s name changed to the Opera House, reflecting a broader French Provincial re-theming of the resort, and it remained a popular entertainment spot until a fire destroyed the building on June 17, 1960. The far-flung bungalows and hotel wings were untouched, but El Rancho Vegas was finished as a casino resort.
Casinos that followed—from the Hotel Last Frontier to the Tropicana—included dinner theaters as a matter of course; they were as necessary to a complete resort as rooms and gaming tables. This classic Las Vegas venue blossomed fully in the Sands’ Copa Room. Other theaters hosted plenty of stars, but the Copa distilled everything Las Vegas of the 1950s and 1960s stood for into an intimate, 385-seat space. It opened along with the rest of the Sands in December 1952 with a show featuring Danny Thomas, and would go on to host many of the day’s hottest casino attractions, most famously the Rat Pack. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. defined an era of Vegas cool.
The Copa Room became iconic not just because of its layout or its performers, but because it combined the talents of two of the business’ best. The first was entertainment director Jack Entratter, who got his start as a bouncer in New York City’s famous Stork nightclub before becoming first the manager, then majority owner of the Copacabana nightclub. The ultimate show business insider, Entratter used his connections, built up over two decades of Manhattan handshaking and favor granting, to lure names who delivered the quality entertainment that high-rollers wanted to see.
That’s where the second half of the partnership came in. Carl Cohen, considered by many to be one of the finest casino managers in the history of Las Vegas, ran a casino that gamblers wanted to play in and was profitable enough to support Entratter’s sometimes-lavish expenditures. Sinatra, after all, didn’t work cheaply, and it cost a lot of money to keep dozens of showgirls in sequins and feathers.
The intimacy of the Copa Room went a long way toward making the Rat Pack into Vegas legends. Their voices carried just as far in an auditorium, but the intimacy of the Copa Room made a night there not just a show but an event. Joey Bishop might greet you on your way to your seat. One table over, you might see a gaggle of conventioneers, hard-faced underworld tough guys or genuine celebrities, from Cary Grant to then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. The show spilled from the stage into the seats, making everyone part of the night. The easy banter between songs, even when it was well rehearsed, made you feel like you were dropping into a friend’s cocktail party. And, of course, after the last bows, you would all head out to Cohen’s crap tables and test fate together. For those of a certain disposition, this was a little slice of heaven in the Mojave Desert.
So it makes a lot of sense to call the high point of classic Las Vegas—the interlude between the Moulin Rouge Agreement in 1960, which desegregated all Strip casinos, and Howard Hughes’ 1967 purchase of the Desert Inn—the Copa era. That little room did more than give gamblers an excuse to come to town: It defined Las Vegas.
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Like the Copa Room, the T-Mobile Arena is a marriage of two industry heavyweights. This time, it’s not so much personalities but companies working together.
MGM Resorts International is the city’s biggest employer and one of the world’s largest gaming companies. The company broke ground on what was then called the Las Vegas Arena in May 2014.
MGM’s partner in the arena, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), is a global leader in entertainment. It presents events at facilities from London’s O2 to the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Closer to home, AEG has programmed the Colosseum at Caesars Palace since 2003. With a mix of extended residencies (Celine, Elton, Bette) and special attractions, the Colosseum earned Billboard’s Venue of the Decade honor for venues under 5,000 seats in 2010.
So it’s not a stretch to say that AEG knows how to run arenas and what works in Las Vegas. Back in the 1950s, Entratter’s personality was enough to score Noël Coward and Nat King Cole. Today, it takes a company like AEG to reel in box-office attractions.
AEG isn’t the only outside presence at the T-Mobile Arena. There’s the wireless communications provider that bought the arena’s naming rights, for one. Founding partners include Coca Cola, Cox Business, Toshiba American Business Solutions and Schneider Electric.
The core may be the same—shows that visitors want to see—but the partnerships that stand behind the arena tell us just how complicated and big the business of entertainment has become.
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After his 1967 entrance into casino ownership, Howard Hughes didn’t change much in Las Vegas entertainment, outside of chasing Sinatra from the Sands (Ol’ Blue Eyes landed on his feet at Caesars Palace’s Circus Maximus). But his fellow aviator and casino magnate Kirk Kerkorian did.
Kerkorian dabbled in Las Vegas in the 1950s, briefly owning shares in the New Frontier. A decade later, he became involved more substantially, leasing Jay Sarno the land on which that incomparable dreamer built Caesars Palace. After a few months as landlord, Kerkorian decided that he wanted a casino of his own, something that would outstrip even Sarno’s ambitions. On a plot adjacent to the Convention Center, in 1967, Kerkorian started work on the International.
With more than 1,500 rooms, the International would be the world’s largest hotel. Never one to do anything in a small way, Kerkorian bought the Flamingo to train the International’s staff. And, from the start, entertainment was going to be another feature Kerkorian and the International’s president, Alex Shoofey, would do on a massive scale.
ts 2,000 seats made the Showroom Internationale a fitting complement to Kerkorian’s king-size resort; it had almost twice the capacity of Circus Maximus, the reigning entertainment emperor. Everything in the International was big. The resort not only had the world’s most hotel rooms, but also its largest casino. Its swimming pool was the second-largest artificial body of water in the state (despite the best efforts of publicists, it didn’t come close to Lake Mead). Like the other rooms in town, it was set up for dinner theater. Most performers played a dinner set followed by a midnight cocktail show, which dispensed with the tables, allowing even more ticket sales.
Barbra Streisand opened the not-quite-finished showroom on July 2, 1969, but the International defined itself—and the early corporate years of the 1970s—with its second headliner (cue up Thus Spoke Zarathustra), Elvis Presley.
Playing to sell-out audiences, Elvis supplanted Frank, Dean and Sammy as the personification of Las Vegas. Spectacle replaced understated cool; performers wouldn’t sip scotch with the crowd, but a lucky fan might catch a scarf thrown by the King.
Hilton Hotels’ 1971 takeover of the International—and its transformation into the Las Vegas Hilton—highlighted the new Las Vegas. Economies of scale displaced personal relationships as the city and its resorts grew. This was now Elvis’ town, not Frank’s. And if his jumpsuit was a little tighter around the middle, well, that was part of growing older.
The Hilton was the corporate future of Las Vegas, but a small casino still dogged by accusations of mob influence pushed the Strip entertainment venue into places few had imagined it could go. The Aladdin was under a cloud. Since opening in 1966, it had changed hands twice and had consistently lost money. A $50 million expansion started in 1974 added a 700-room hotel tower, 40,000 square feet of meeting space and what Aladdin owners hoped would give the beleaguered resort a standout attraction: the 7,500-seat Theater for the Performing Arts, which was more than a scaled-up version of the Round-Up Room; it was a real concert hall.
With its new venue, the Aladdin was able to attract acts that would have never played the International Showroom, let alone the Copa—Alice Cooper, Peter Frampton, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Yes, Styx and the Electric Light Orchestra. It wasn’t all rock and roll. Country stars such as Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn played the theater, and Sinatra himself performed there semi-regularly, as an annual “thank you” concert for supporters of UNLV’s athletic programs.
The Aladdin Theater increased the range of entertainment in Las Vegas and was a moneymaker, but its success didn’t end the problems at the casino itself, which endured several ownership changes before closing in 1998. But that wasn’t the end. The theater was incorporated—with substantial renovations—into the new Aladdin that opened two years later. Now known as the AXIS at Planet Hollywood, it is currently as busy as ever and has recently hosted residencies by Britney Spears, Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez. Few spaces can claim to have better made the jump from old Vegas to new.
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The Strip has always been about more than just gambling. Rooms and food are essentials, since even the most diehard gamblers need to eat and sleep. Entertainment is just as important. No Strip resort since El Rancho Vegas has opened without a substantial entertainment program. However, since the opening of The Mirage in 1989, nongaming elements have become progressively more important to Strip casinos. The recession and its aftermath has accelerated the growth of nongaming revenue.
Since 2007, visitor spending on gaming has fallen by 15 percent, while nongaming spending has increased by 10 percent. Entertainment has been a big part of this growth.
Adding an arena, in partnership with a proven leader, makes sense. It makes even more sense to make that arena the center of a district filled with restaurants and bars. The company has called it a “neighborhood environment,” and the description seems apt. The Park, as the district is called, is meant to be a place for visitors to, as the company says, “relax, dine and be entertained.”
Note that gambling isn’t on that list. Even 10 years ago, an investment of this scale with no gambling component was a nonstarter, but it is entirely consistent with what visitors are doing when they are in town today. MGM Resorts should be happy for its guests to spend their time and money at The Park, and not that concerned over whether they ever make it to the slot machines, because in today’s Las Vegas, fewer of them are sitting down to play.
From 2007 to 2014, the number of visitors to Las Vegas increased by about 2 million. But in that same span, the number of visitors who gambled at all fell by 2.3 million. More people than ever are coming, but fewer of them want to do what put Las Vegas on the map. Why is that? Maybe because of the proliferation of casinos outside Nevada, maybe because of tighter gambling conditions on the Strip, or maybe visitors post-recession are more risk-averse.
Whatever the reason, this trend is not going away and seems to be intensifying. That’s why Caesars Entertainment built its own outdoor district, the Linq. Gambling revenue is stable at best, shrinking at worst, while spending on shows, food and drinks is growing.
The Linq has its own anchor—the High Roller—but Brooklyn Bowl might be the breakout star of its lineup. The restaurant/bowling alley/concert venue doesn’t come close to the scale of the T-Mobile Arena, but its presence shows that entertainment is a hook that works in today’s Las Vegas.
There’s nothing unique about surrounding an arena with restaurants and bars—AEG’s own L.A. Live is one prominent example. But surrounding the arena with outdoor attractions shows that MGM and AEG have a read on what today’s visitors want, and are providing it. This is an entertainment venue built for the scale and substance of what people look for when they come to Las Vegas in 2016.
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When it came time to open the world’s biggest hotel for the third time, Kerkorian again turned to entertainment as a difference maker. His second MGM Grand hotel welcomed guests in 1993. With more than 5,000 rooms, a shopping arcade and celebrity eateries from Wolfgang Puck and Mark Miller, it was as much of a leap forward as the International had been in 1969. The Grand Adventures theme park, Rainforest Café and Wizard of Oz theming placed it squarely in the early 1990s megaresort era. Its entertainment venue, however, set it apart from the crowd. Circus Circus had the Grand Slam Canyon (today’s Adventuredome) and just about everyone had a theme, but no one could stage shows on the scale of MGM Grand, thanks to its not-so-secret weapon, the Grand Garden Arena.
With an initial capacity of more than 15,000 for boxing and 12,000 for concerts, the Grand Garden was the only multipurpose arena within a Las Vegas hotel-casino. It could host concerts, boxing and even hockey games, but it was also intended for conventions. Early promotional material boasted that the Grand Garden could switch from a sports setup to a 110,000-square-foot exhibition space in just four hours. At more than twice the size of the Aladdin Theater for the Performing Arts, this was just as big a jump for the Strip as the massive hotel itself.
Opening such a behemoth required a special touch. In a callback to the debut of the International 24 years earlier, Streisand gave the arena’s inaugural performance on December 31, 1993. Since then, it has hosted numerous championship boxing matches, Ultimate Fighting Championship cards, concerts and sporting events, from preseason professional basketball and hockey to the Professional Bull Riders World Finals.
This was a functional addition to the Strip and also a symbol of the new, scaled-up era. The Sands, Dunes and Hacienda were going the way of El Rancho Vegas, making way for the giants that stand today. Casino entertainment was no longer confined to lounges and dinner theaters, and no longer a niche for the stars of yesterday. Currently touring megashows, from the Eagles to Justin Bieber, could make stops right on the Strip. Hosting Britney Spears and U2 was, no doubt, a solid business decision, but it speaks volumes about how mainstream Las Vegas casinos became in the 1990s. The Grand Garden Arena helped, as much as anything, to identify the Strip as a venue for the best of current entertainment.
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There’s a lot about the T-Mobile Arena that may not have made sense to those who built earlier entertainment landmarks. Things like sustainable design, luxury boxes and cellphone charging stations would have been unimaginable when the Copa Room was at its best. But the core idea—build it bigger, build it bolder, build it better—would have resonated. It’s a new arena that may open up new possibilities for Las Vegas, and it is squarely in the tradition of Strip entertainment groundbreakers.
The Round-Up Room started casino shows on the Strip. The Copa Room defined cool. The Showroom Internationale brought the city into the corporate, mass-production age. The Aladdin Theater for the Performing Arts proved that arena-style shows could work in Las Vegas. The Grand Garden Arena stepped it up for the megaresort era.
What will the T-Mobile Arena mean when this chapter of Las Vegas history is written? It’s impossible to say now, but one thing is certain: As surely as its predecessors, it will represent our era.
