Why Macau Matters | Vegas Seven | May 16-22

the twisted world of a strip contortionist

May 16-22, 2013

The story of the Chinese island that’s changing the way Las Vegas thinks

By David G. Schwartz

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EvEnt

Foodie Frenzy

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[ upcoming ]

may 24-25 Ninth annual Best Dam Barbecue Challenge in Boulder City (BestDamBarbecue.com) June 1 Children’s Art Festival at Centennial Hills Park (ArtsLasVegas.org)

Photos by Ethan Miller

May 16-22, 2013

The seventh annual Vegas Uncork’d popped up and down the Las Vegas Strip on May 9-12, with four full days of demonstrations and tastings with the world’s best chefs. The festivities included a poolside preview of Michael Mina’s upcoming Pub 1842; appearances by such famed celebrity chefs as Gordon Ramsay, Bobby Flay and Rick Moonen; and Masaharu Morimoto’s announcement of a new Japanese restaurant, Morimoto Las Vegas, which he plans to open at The Mirage next year. The highlight was the May 10 “Grand Tasting” at Caesars Palace, where more than 2,500 attendees sampled cuisine and cocktails from such restaurants as Border Grill, Nobu and SushiSamba, while DJ M!ke Attack catered to the crowd throughout the affair.

the latest

ers like Nicolas Cage, whose visit to Carson City to lobby for the tax break produced the kind of slavering from legislators and media alike that used to be considered embarrassing in polite company. So they want to make it easier for Cage to make a movie but tougher for me to be able to afford to see it?

But then, suddenly, things happen that give you hope: • One of Cage’s opponents, Steve Wynn, opposes the entertainment tax but supports a business tax.

Kirkpatrick reportedly walked out when Wynn started yelling at her on that subject.

• After the state Senate approved the resolution to put the gay-marriage ban back on the ballot and give Nevada voters the chance to redeem themselves for earlier bigotry, the Assembly held a hearing flled with eloquence and empathy.

• Lawmakers seem inclined to support measures to force transparency on state agencies and empower themselves more in the governing process, perhaps a frst step on the road to long-needed annual sessions.

• Democrats and Republicans alike voiced their displeasure with the proposal from the governor’s budget chief to make state employee pay cuts permanent.

So it turns out the Legislature has some Jekyll to its Hyde. We’d like to see a bit more of the good doctor.

There’s something about off-the-menu specials that gets people fired up—maybe it’s the sneaky pleasure of knowing a secret. Or maybe it’s just that they’re usually a good deal. There are surprisingly few ongoing “OTM” deals in Las Vegas, but those that are out there are worth trying: • The king of OTMs comes from Ellis Island’s Café: the 24/7 filet-cut sirloin steak dinner. It comes with soup or salad, vegetable, choice of potato, roll, and a home-brewed Ellis Island beer (or soft drink) for $8.99. And if you play one dollar in any slot or video poker machine, you’ll get a voucher to get it for $7.99.

• A close second is the “Gambler’s Special” at Mr. Lucky’s in the Hard Rock: a sirloin steak and three grilled shrimp, plus mashed potatoes and a big side salad for $7.77 (with a players card). In reality, this (and the Ellis Island steak) are so well known that some of their OTM luster has worn off. But here’s one that most don’t know about: From 2 to 10 p.m. on Sundays only, Mr. Lucky’s offers an off-the-menu prime rib deal. The meal comes with a side potato only, but it’s all the prime rib you can eat for just $9.99.

• The other ongoing OTM special is at the Sourdough Cafés at Arizona Charlie’s Decatur and Boulder, where a 24/7 steak-and-shrimp comes with soup or salad, choice of potato, and veggies. It’s $10.99 with a players card or $11.99 without.

• Other casino off-the-menu specials show up for limited durations, such as a $9.99 T-bone dinner currently running at Station Casino’s Grand Cafés, but you can also find them at noncasino locations. The classic is the osso buco at Piero’s. There’s a little problem here, in that at $42, it’s the most expensive thing they serve.

But this is a case where the coolness of knowing about it is the best part of the deal.

• Biaggio’s Pizzeria (4235 S. Fort Apache Rd.) boasts an off-the-menu BLT ($9.99) that uses “extra-thick cut bacon.” Its off-menuness is due in part to a house policy of not making it if they can’t get the right bacon. In addition, there’s what the chef describes as a “secret Italian-Irish Stromboli” ($15.99), which combines corned beef, Swiss cheese, and sauerkraut.

• For something different, Mr Tofu Korean restaurant (3889 Spring Mountain Rd.) has a mushroom sundubu (hot and spicy stew made with uncurdled tofu) for $8.65.

• Even the chains have gotten into the OTM game. Las Vegas’ 13 Jamba Juice locations have four off-menu Gummie Bear smoothies (red, white, blue and sour). And after launching a secret menu of healthy “power” dishes in New York in 2012, Panera Bread rolled it out nationwide this year. Just tell your server you’re ordering off the “Hidden Menu.” And wink.

Michael Green is a professor of history at the College of Southern Nevada.

Anthony Curtis is the publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor and LasVegasAdvisor.com.

May 16-22, 2013

Two Faces of the Legislature

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The noTion ThaT the state Legislature has more than one personality makes sense, since it has 63 members. But as a body, the Legislature never ceases to be depressing.

Except when it’s exhilarating.

It’s easy to be depressed about the Legislature’s handling of taxes and the economy—or to admire how badly it mangles them. Democrats led by Assembly Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick are pushing an entertainment tax, which isn’t a bad idea, since it wouldn’t be raising the sales tax that everybody pays. But it’s still another regressive tax that targets equally the pocketbook of the poorest (who might have scrimped to be able to buy a ticket at the cineplex) and the wealthiest (who can afford the most expensive seats at whatever Vegas show they like).

Meanwhile, some Republicans in the state Senate are urging a higher mining tax, which is the best news since the invention of fre.

So, why aren’t Democrats falling all over themselves to support Minority Leader Michael Roberson and company?

First, because Republicans brought up the idea. While Kirkpatrick and state Senate Majority Leader Mo Denis really do want to work with the other side, they have reason to be leery. The proposal comes from members of a party that has been opposed to and dishonest about tax hikes for many years. Think back to 2003: Governor Kenny Guinn, a Republican,

proposed a hike of more than $800 million. A group of 15 Republicans countered by saying they would accept a $704 million increase. This somehow allowed them to present themselves as anti-tax crusaders and to win support from people who accused Guinn of being a taxand-spend liberal. (Guinn’s proposal ultimately passed anyway.)

Second, the mining-tax proposal may well have a streak of duplicity to it. It’s tied to the Republican desire to defeat a business-tax proposal that teachers managed to put on the ballot for 2014. Would Republicans propose a mining tax hike in hopes of killing the much-needed business tax, and then hope the mining tax goes down, too? Think back to 2006, when activists won a place on the ballot for an initiative against smoking in various public places, and the gaming industry got a rival initiative on the ballot in order to confuse, divide and conquer.

(The industry’s effort failed, and the original initiative passed.)

Third, Governor Brian Sandoval continues to claim to oppose all taxes except the ones he already likes, so who knows whether any of it will matter?

Of course, Democrats are hardly untainted. They’re thumping for a tax break for struggling flmmak-

Illustration by Thomas Speak

The BeauTy of oTM

The LATesT

Generation E

Can a little electricity co-op lead Nevada to the promised land of renewable energy?

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In the not-too-dIstant future, a woman gets home from work in Bakersfeld, California. As she walks in her house, she refexively ficks on a light. Little does she know, the electricity entering the lamp over her head comes from a solar plant in Nevada’s Amargosa Valley via a high-voltage transmission line owned by Valley Electric Association (VEA), a nonproft co-op based in Pahrump.

That’s the future Thomas H. Husted, CEO of VEA, dreams of today. It’s an ambitious plan for an organization that began as a small band of farmers trying to get electricity to their homes and irrigation lines.

Yet VEA is just one example of many co-ops across the country that are adopting progressive practices in energy generation, transmission and distribution.

They’re proving themselves effective agents of the predicted change in domestic power from fossil fuels to more renewable sources, such as geothermal, wind and solar.

VEA believes it has an important role to play in developing renewable energy in Nevada— a sector that proponents of economic diversifcation have often said holds promise for the state. And VEA is making some bold moves in other areas, too.

In the past year, it won two federal service contracts—for the Nevada National Security Site (still known colloquially as the Nevada Test Site) and Creech Air Force Base—that have piqued the ire of the state’s 800-pound utility gorilla, NV Energy.

So, who is this (relatively) small player with big ambitions?

VEA’s story starts with the New Deal. During the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt noticed that some 90 percent of people living in

urban areas had electricity, while only 10 percent of those in rural areas did. Private utility companies—known today as investor-owned utilities—didn’t want to serve rural areas because of prohibitive infrastructure construction costs; nor did they want the federal government to own and operate rural utilities. So Roosevelt created the Rural Electrifcation Administration to jump-start co-ops with loans and other assistance.

VEA grew out of the Amargosa Valley Cooperative, which got a $3.9 million REA construction loan in 1962, and three other small utilities. They incorporated in 1965, and today their service area covers 6,800 square miles in southwestern Nevada, along the California border, from Sandy Valley in the southwest to Fish Lake Valley in the north.

When the group built its frst transmission line, it had only about 600 meters. That’s grown to 22,000 meters today.

Compared with NV Energy’s millions of customers, the number seems tiny. But the real strength of co-ops is in the name: cooperation. One of their basic tenets is collaboration with each other, and national groups facilitate this, along with providing marketing and research support.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association counts 905 co-ops serving 18.5 million customers in the U.S. Compare that with 200 investor-owned utilities serving 104 million customers, and you start to see the differences between the two types of company: Co-ops are member-owned and operated, so they focus on good service at a good price; investor-owned utilities are high-volume outfts that focus on making

profts for shareholders.

This helps explain why co-ops are leading the charge toward renewables: They can afford to eat some up-front investment costs if it means more savings for members down the road.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Husted says. “Just because we’re an energy company and we sell electricity, that does not mean we’re judged by the amount of energy we sell. At the end of the day, it’s about value.”

That’s how Husted lays out the philosophy behind VEA’s solar water heater program,

which puts the energy-effcient, money-saving technology in members’ homes at wholesale cost. In other words, the utility is subsidizing the installation of equipment that reduces the amount of electricity its customers buy.

Nevertheless, co-ops are businesses, and businesses are about growth. Profts are typically put in reserves, paid out to members as dividends or used to fund programs such as the six scholarships VEA will hand out to local students this year.

In order to keep grow-

ing, VEA, like any business, has looked for opportunity.

Lately, renewable-energy development presented itself as one viable path to growth.

The company’s territory is large, and it has experience in high-voltage transmission, which moves electricity from generating stations to distribution networks. Ask any economist or politician what’s standing in the way of renewable development in Nevada, and they’ll say “transmission”—meaning we lack the infrastructure to move any

Photo by Andrew James

May 16-22, 2013

By Heidi Kyser

THE HISTOR OF OUR FU May 16-22, 2013

OR, HOW MACAU BECAME THE LAS VEGAS OF THE 21ST CENTURY AND IS ABOUT

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ended there: Ho introduced Western games, including baccarat, to the city in 1962.

That was an inspired move.

Over the next three decades, baccarat would grow to become, by far, the most popular casino game in Asia. And it cast Ho as a Westernizing reformer, willing to open the city to new ideas even as he invested in new hotels.

But there was a dark side. In the 1980s, Stanley Ho created a junket system that proved both proftable and diffcult to police. Instead of taking on the risk of extending credit to big players, he essentially rented out his high-end gambling rooms to VIP room operators, who in turn subcontracted with junket operators to bring in specifc groups of gamblers.

That meant the people licensed by Macau to run casinos couldn’t really know who was playing in their high-limit rooms, let alone collect their tax information. There were two to three layers of plausible deniability between the players and the casino executives. Back in 1960, the Nevada Gaming Control Board had adopted its List of Excluded Persons—colloquially known as the Black Book—to keep “undesirable” mob types out of casinos; the Macau system, it seemed, was tailor-made to allow them in.

Organized-crime groups were said to have a tight grip on money laundering and loan sharking in and around the VIP rooms.

In the 1980s and 90s, with money and power hinging on control of those VIP rooms, violence spilled over into the streets of Macau. Car bombings, stabbings and shootings became nearly commonplace.

Things didn’t get better until mainland China took over.

The Beijing government has its faws, but hesitation in dealing with threats to public order is not one of them. In the words of one executive, “a Red Army brigade moved in, and never left.”

Las Vegas—despite its casinos’ reputation as banks for some of the nation’s most violent organized-crime families—never had that level of open viciousness. The outbreaks of gang violence in and around Macau casinos underscored the brutality of the triads, the high stakes of Macau casinos and the lingering cultural disconnect between China and America. *** “The difference between Asian society and American society,” says a Las Vegas executive who

has worked in Macau, “is that when you go to a 10-year-old kid in Macau, education is far and away the most important thing in the world to him.

They want to do better. They don’t mind going to school for extra hours, going to school on Saturday; they want to be No. 1, because they want a better life.

“When I asked one of my friend’s kids—he was maybe 12— what he wanted to be, he said a hedge-fund manager. A hedgefund manager. Over here, we’ve got college kids who probably don’t even know what a hedgefund manager is, much less what they want to do with their lives. It just shows you how driven they are over there. It’s all about money.”

Mainland China is still offcially communist, but Macau is a city where nothing is in moderation. This colors the way mainland visitors approach the city’s casinos. Visitors from the mainland have limited time, and they want to do two things: gam-

ble and see something unusual or spectacular. Casinos that had knockout must-see appeal, like the Venetian (the biggest casino in the world), have prospered.

Those that didn’t learned the hard way that to survive they had to deliver something else like the Venetian’s sheer size and scale or Wynn’s Lake of Dreams that would make a good story back in Guangzhou. The necessity of making that checklist puts enormous pressure on those who run Macau casinos. It’s a lucrative market, still something of a zerosum game: A rival’s success is seen as a loss. *** History caught up with the Portuguese enclave in 1999, when control of Macau reverted to Beijing, which promulgated the same “one country, two systems” method that it had applied to Hong Kong: The communist government pledged to not interfere with Macau’s capitalist economy for 50 years

and gave it suffcient local autonomy to allow its casinos to remain open.

In 2001, the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR), under the leadership of Edmund Ho (no relation to Stanley), reopened the gaming concession to bidding. Stanley Ho, after 40 years astride the city, was far and away its wealthiest and most infuential citizen, with vast holdings including real estate, banks and key chunks of the city’s transformation network.

That kind of power is diffcult to comprehend in the United States: We speak of the big casino companies exercising undue infuence, but imagine that one man owned every single casino, hotel and gambling saloon in town, plus McCarran Airport, Interstate 15, Green Valley, a few shopping malls and a bank.

That’s power.

But Stanley Ho’s power couldn’t fend off competition.

The Macau SAR, looking to modernize, wanted more than

Old Macau photo from Alinari Archives, photo from Bloomberg

May 16-22, 2013 VEGAS SEVEN

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Still—and this is a constant in Macau’s history—there was a feeling that the city could do better. Licensing the fan-tan houses (which ran in tandem with the cathouses) helped the colonial government pay the bills; it didn’t stoke any real development in the city. With few good industrial or commercial prospects, Macau seemed to have hit a wall.

Then came the 1930s. We’ve all heard about how that decade gave us Nevada’s modern regime of legal gambling. But something happened in Macau then as well. Gambling had been legal there for as long it is now in Las Vegas, and the government decided to shuffe the deck. It ruthlessly suppressed the rabble of the fan-tan houses, shifting its imprimatur to casinos in relatively upscale hotels. By doing this, the governor hoped to draw wealthy visitors from surrounding cities instead of the reckless sailors who were the chief fan-tan devotees.

But there was more to it than that. As part of the modernizing effort, the government chose to auction off the right to offer games to a single private company that, in return for its share of the monopoly, would give a bigger cut of the proceeds to the government. After all, without competitors, the gambling enterprise could run more effciently.

So starting in 1937, the Tai Xing syndicate, helmed by Laorong Fu, took control of Macau gambling, retaining its hold through the storm and stress that gripped China during the years of war and revolution. Fu’s son, Tak Iam Fu, ran the company through the 1950s and became quite wealthy, acquiring a great deal of real estate and the Hong Kong/Macau ferry. The ferry was particularly important, since with the communist mainland government barring its population from Macau, British-owned Hong Kong was Fu’s chief feeder market.

But Fu didn’t do as much to promote development as the Portuguese government would have liked, and in 1961 it opened the gambling monopoly up to bid again, this time asking for a company that would promote Macau as a “gaming and tourism” destination.

The winner? The Sociedade de Tourismo e Diversões de Macau (STDM), a company run by Stanley Ho, a 40-yearold shipping millionaire with hardscrabble roots. Like Fu, Ho ran casinos in hotels throughout the city. But the similarity

Stanley Ho has towered over Macau’s gaming scene for 50 years, watching a sleepy Portuguese colony grow into a global resort destination, complete with Vegas flair—and Vegas casino moguls.

Photo by Jack Garafalo

Ho could offer. So it allowed American companies to bid on three licenses.

In 2002, Edmund Ho announced the winners: SJM, a subsidiary of Ho’s company, STDM; Wynn Resorts, which at the time didn’t have any Macau casinos in operation, but did boast Steve Wynn’s impressive skills; and an alliance of Hong Kong-based Galaxy and Las Vegas Sands, which owned the newly opened Venetian and promised to build a similarly convention-heavy resort.

But the two companies had trouble working together and, rather than pitch one of them out, the SAR decided to let Galaxy keep the “concession” and to award Las Vegas Sands its own “subconcession.” The two companies went their separate ways and the government decided to allow SJM and Wynn to sell one subconcession each, raising the total of operators to six.

That’s how Melco Crown—a joint venture between Stanley Ho’s

Seeing Macau’S revenue Skyrocket while laS vegaS’ SluMped, SoMe analyStS concluded that Macau waS a threat. the oppoSite waS true: Macau waS a boon.

*** The bidding process for Macau concessions wasn’t as fevered as it would be in Singapore a scant fve years later: Asian casinos were an unknown quantity, and the gaming industry is never comfortable with unknown quantities. Many American companies gave a perfunctory effort at best; others chose not to bid at all. Concerns about organized crime were paramount. “Everyone we looked at doing business with,” said an investigator for a company that declined to bid, “ended up being connected back to the triads.”

It had been less than 20 years since the U.S. casino industry had purged organized crime from its ranks. In 1999, the Gambling Impact Study Commission had fnally ruled that American gaming was free of the taint of the mob. Casinos had at last gained not just legitimacy, but a familiarity in America that was unthinkable in the 1980s. Thanks to the spread of tribal government and riverboat gambling, casinos were more mundane than mobbed-up in the public consciousness. Part of the bargain was remaining squeaky clean. Many executives thought American regulators wouldn’t countenance any dalliances with criminal elements in Asia.

But the nature of Macau’s casino business, as it had been run up to that point, made it diffcult to steer clear of groups with alleged organized-crime ties. Chinese government policies are partly to blame. For example, visitors from mainland China are permitted to bring a maximum of about $3,200 per trip with them; most gamble far more than that. So they head to one of the pawnshops that surround Macau casinos, not to

May 16-22, 2013

*** Paul Steelman has been designing casinos since the 1970s; his frst job was to help convert Atlantic City’s weathered Haddon Hall into Resorts International, its frst casino.

Since starting his own practice in 1987, he’s designed casinos in Las Vegas, Mississippi, South Africa and Finland, among other locales. But when he accepted the commission to design the frst Western-owned casino in Macau, he threw the rule book out the window.

“We didn’t really use a model,” he says of the early design process. “I stood in the old Lisboa and watched the Asians gamble. I realized it was a sport, not just an entertainment activity, and decided to design the frst stadium casino.

All of the existing casinos were low, smoke-flled rooms. I decided that I wanted to make a beautiful, large-volume casino, flled with natural daylight.”

Steelman was proposing the opposite of what Macau already had—Stanley Ho’s casinos were uniformly smoky, spread over three or four levels, and worn out. But building a late-1990s Vegas-style slot palace wouldn’t work. These weren’t the moderate-but-frequent players who come to Las Vegas, intent on gambling but looking for other entertainment as well. Sands Macao would cater to gamblers who, frst and foremost, wanted to play baccarat, with as few distractions as possible. So Steelman created something novel— detractors called it a “baccarat barn”—that was open and spacious and, for a time, the most

proftable casino in the world.

Slot machines were almost an afterthought, and close adherence to feng-shui principles meant breaking many of the rules in the casino-design playbook—no maze-like casino here, just quick, open lines to the nearest gaming table. And no cocktail waitresses either; tea girls, walking the foor with steaming canisters of the beverage toted on their backs, would attend to all the needs most gamblers would have.

It was a taste of what would happen when West met East: a new hybrid, drawing on the heritage of both, but undeniably of its own kind.

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son, Lawrence, and Australian media and betting scion James Packer—and MGM Resorts, via a partnership with Stanley Ho’s daughter, Pansy, won the right to build. And that was it: The SAR announced there would be no more licenses granted. The Las Vegas companies that had gotten in—Wynn, Las Vegas Sands and MGM—were in the catbird seat.

Those that didn’t—chiefy Caesars Entertainment—were on the sidelines for what some vaguely hoped would be the biggest gambling boom in history.

Before those fnal subconcessions were granted, though, the gambling world shifted on its magnetic pole: A Las Vegas company opened a casino in Macau, and neither town has been the same since.

pawn a family heirloom in hope of winning the rent money, but to make a clean, clinical transaction. They “buy” an expensive watch using a credit card, then immediately decide to “return” it, getting cash back in return.

It’s a good deal for the pawnshop owner, who can make 5 to 10 percent per transaction, but it shows the ease with which gamblers can sidestep the spirit of the law while adhering to its letter.

Similarly, gambling debts can’t be legally collected on the mainland. That would be a problem for law-abiding businesses, but it somehow all gets sorted out in the murky web of connections between VIProom concessionaires, junket operators and those linked to organized crime.

There are plenty of conjectures about the extent of organized crime infuence in Macau VIP rooms, and the sources of funds that mainlanders lose there. But one fact is undisputed: Macau’s wealth is built on baccarat. You can fnd roulette and blackjack tables in Macau; you can even fnd tombola and boule, which are totally obscure to Las Vegas gamblers.

But 91 percent of the money Macau casinos make comes from baccarat. In the U.S., it had been a favored game of high-rollers, something tucked off to the side in a special room, not a game to build a casino around. But in China, it’s a game to build an entire city around. There may be strange and even terrible stories about the sources of the money that is exchanged for chips in those VIP rooms, but the cash that baccarat generates means that there are few questions asked and fewer answers offered.

May 16-22, 2013

***

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For 10 years, the conventional wisdom has been that Macau is just Las Vegas in an earlier stage of development, so in the short term Las Vegas licensees will do their best to steer clear of the more notorious triad-connected junket operators, and will hold their noses until modern casino management tames Macau like it did Nevada.

And on the surface, Las Vegas has changed Macau. The focus never shifted to slot players, and loyalty cards never gained traction (the citizens of the communist mainland guard their privacy more zealously than Americans). But with the

opening of the Venetian Macao in the summer of 2007, several changes became apparent: With a Morton’s steakhouse, the resort made Western cuisine that much more accessible, and other steakhouses and Italian restaurants started to elbow between the noodle bars. A premium mass-market customer, who didn’t have the means to gamble in a VIP room but wanted more than hot tea and nonstop baccarat, began to emerge. In the end, Macau did become a bit more like Las Vegas.

So, since 2002, we’ve been waiting for Las Vegas to lead Macau out of the dark ages and into the brave new world of corporate fnance, slot machines and players cards. It’s no surprise that when Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands reclaimed a plot of land from the South China Sea, it called it the Cotai Strip. It’s also no surprise that the hotel Adelson built there looks very similar to the Las Vegas Venetian. Or that Wynn Macau echoes Wynn Las Vegas, right down to having a sister property named Encore.

But 10 years later it looks like Macau has also reshaped Las Vegas in ways that no one predicted. It’s made us more creative and more enterprising, prompting the city’s casinos to embrace change that they once shunned. It’s altered the architecture of the casino. And in a city where slots have long been dominant, it’s made baccarat the hottest game in the casino.

With Macau giving three of the city’s biggest operators (Wynn, Las Vegas Sands and MGM) a lifeline during the worst years of the recession, it’s not overstating things to say that the Las Vegas gaming industry owes much of what stability it currently has to Macau.

Executives who do a tour in Macau return, as one executive who’s worked in both markets puts it, “much smarter, with a much broader view of what can be done as opposed to what can’t be done,” which explains the greater regulatory fexibility the State has shown in approaching innovations such as private gaming salons (a direct Asian import) and online play. It also explains the greater aggressiveness with which companies have pursued expansion opportunities, both domestically and internationally.

More fundamentally, Macau has changed the way Las Vegas runs. We don’t publicize the

fact, but Macau isn’t the frst city to knock Las Vegas off its perch. In 1982, only its fourth full year of casino gaming, Atlantic City surpassed the Las Vegas Strip in annual revenue.

Las Vegas operators thought they’d educate the newly born seaside gaming haven, but visitors to the city had their own ideas: They preferred slots to table games, and the entire business model of casinos shifted to accommodate slot players, which was refected in everything from casino design (this is around the time that casinos added stools to slot machines, letting players linger longer) to the rise of playerloyalty programs.

By the end of the 1980s, slots were ascendant on the Strip, and it wasn’t until 1999 that the Strip permanently surpassed Atlantic City in annual casino win. Thirty-fve years later, could Macau shift the city back to baccarat?

Before the Great Recession, the future of Las Vegas seemed

clear: It had staved off the challenge of domestic casino expansion, and would continue to become a pricier destination. Room rates were galloping upward, as was occupancy, which explains the ambitious plans to add tens of thousands of upscale rooms to the market.

Slot machines were going to continue to be the primary money-maker for casinos, even on the Strip; that had been the trend for the previous 30 years.

The Great Recession changed all that. Domestic gamblers kept coming to Las Vegas, but they cut back their spending. The big companies that dominate the Strip teetered, in varying proportions, on the brink of bankruptcy.

And then dawned the baccarat recovery: Slot win continued to slump but, month after month, whale-size wins in baccarat, the game of choice for high-end Asian players, bailed out the Strip. Companies with booming operations in China,

such as Las Vegas Sands and Wynn, roared back to prosperity; MGM, which had a smaller market share, bought itself some breathing room; and Caesars, locked out of Asia but still aggressively marketing to high-rollers there, inched away from the precipice.

Seeing Macau’s revenue skyrocket while Las Vegas’ slumped, some armchair analysts concluded that Macau was a threat.

The opposite, though, was true: Macau (and, more broadly, China) was a boon to Las Vegas.

Why? Simple tax mathematics: Companies, like individuals, want to pay as little tax as legally possible. The gaming-revenue tax rate in Macau for U.S. operators is 39 percent; in Las Vegas, it’s 6.75 percent. So let’s say a Las Vegas-based company has a player who, all things being equal, will lose about $1 million in a trip. If he plays in Macau, the casino keeps $610,000. If he plays in Las Vegas, the casino keeps $932,500.

Crowd photo by Peter Parks, Sands photo by Palani Mohan

The opening of Sands Macao in May 2004 was greeted with feverish enthusiasm. MGM Resorts brought another legendary Las Vegas name to the island in 2007.

nightlife

parties

marquee dayclub The Cosmopolitan [ Upcoming ]

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See more photos from this gallery at SpyOnVegas.com

Photography by Powers Imagery

May 16-22, 2013

May 18 Wet Wonderland feat. Benny Benassi May 24 Arty spins May 26 Kaskade’s Summer Lovin

nightlife

parties

Bagatelle Beach cluB

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See more photos from this gallery at SpyOnVegas.com

Photography by Teddy Fujimoto

May 16-22, 2013

Tropicana

nightlife

parties

tao Beach The Venetian [ Upcoming ]

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See more photos from this gallery at SpyOnVegas.com

Photography by Powers Imagery

May 16-22, 2013

May 17 DJ Javier Alba spins May 18 Theophilus London performs May 19 Sunday Brunch launch party

nightlife

parties

hakkasan MGM Grand [ Upcoming ]

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See more photos from this gallery at SpyOnVegas.com

Photography by Joe Fury, Tony Tran and Teddy Fujimoto

May 16-22, 2013

May 16 Nervo spins May 18 TiĂŤsto spins May 26 Deadmau5 Unhooked & Steve Aoki

nightlife

parties

haZe Aria

[ Upcoming ]

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See more photos from this gallery at SpyOnVegas.com

Photography by Amit Dadlaney, Joe Fury and Toby Acuna

May 16-22, 2013

May 18 Jay Sean performs May 23 Major Lazer spins May 25 J. Cole hosts

nightlife

parties

hYDe Bellagio

[ Upcoming ]

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See more photos from this gallery at SpyOnVegas.com

Photography by Tony Tran

May 16-22, 2013

May 16 Live Music Thursday May 17 D-Miles & Turbulence spin May 21 Lost Angels Industry Party

dining

TrendspoTTing

Chef Michael Trimboli and Elizabeth Coleman prepare a box lunch at Greens & Proteins (left); teriyaki chicken from Fixt Food (above).

Special Delivery May 16-22, 2013

Meal-delivery services with a health-conscious twist simplify even the most complicated Las Vegas lifestyles

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By Nikki Neu

➧ A growing Trend in Las Vegas, health-conscious meal preparation and delivery services offer programs tailored to your diet and delivered to your doorstep. This type of service isn’t new, but here’s the twist: The food is actually delicious.

And favorful recipes (think

grilled flet mignon) attract the most discriminating foodies, while respecting their dietary goals.

“This service seemed like a no-brainer: Healthy and delicious food delivered to my door every morning? Sold!” says Rachel Wenman, a Fixt

Foods customer. Wenman’s day job as senior brand marketing manager for 9Group keeps her busy, sometimes with minimal time to choose something nutritious for lunch. She says she decided to try Las Vegasbased Fixt Food because she is always on the go and rarely has

Fixt Food Fixt Food offers healthful gourmet meals that cater to your diet, and the meals rotate daily. You choose the number of meals delivered, the total calories and the number of days. You can even choose your own entrées. Some of the menu items include grilled vegetable and goat cheese omelets, grilled flet mignon with asparagus, pepper salmon, Thai beef salad and chicken paprikaish. “One of my favorite meals was their gluten-free protein-flled pancakes with berries for breakfast,” says Wenman, who found it diffcult to fnd gluten-free, low-calorie meals. Daily meal delivery starts at $27.30 for two meals, 900-8790, FixtFood.com.

Fresh+Life Cuisine Delivering citywide, Fresh+Life Cuisine offers tasty meals like herb-roasted chicken, brown rice and squash.

Other items include hearty salads, turkey sandwiches and baked goods. If ordering from Fresh+Life Cuisine, make sure you get some of chef Courtney Rogers’ fresh-squeezed juices, such as cucumber and parsley,

carrot with kale and aloe, and carrot with cabbage juice. Meal prices start at $10, 624-6134.

The Skinny Healthy Chef It was only a matter of time before healthy food went mobile in food-truck form. The Skinny Healthy Chef delivers tempting creations, including a wild-caught salmon burger and grilled chicken sandwich, to your neighborhood. The limegreen truck can often be seen at corporate centers, sporting events and other businesses.

You can also have the truck cater your next healthy special event. Individual meal prices vary, 756-1056, SkinnyHealthyChef.com.

Greens & Proteins For those looking to lose weight, Greens & Proteins offers a no-fuss meal program based on 500 calories per day spread over two cooked, packaged and ready-to-go meals per day, plus fruit, which you can buy on your own or from Greens & Proteins for an additional $2.50 per serving.

Each meal includes a 4-ounce serving of protein and two cups of vegetables per meal.

When you fll out your weekly form, you can choose from entrée options such as Angus burger, shrimp or tilapia with vegetables, including spinach, cabbage and asparagus. Each meal costs $10, so two meals per day plus tax will run you about $155 per week. While there’s no delivery service available, you can pick up your orders on Mondays and Thursdays, and have them ready to go for the rest of the week.

9809 W. Flamingo Rd., 541-6400; 8975 S. Eastern Ave., 541-7800, GreensandProteins.com.

Greens & Proteins photo by Anthony Mair

time to cook. Wenman used the healthful meal-delivery service as an alternative to relying on restaurants, where there is less control over portion size, fat and calories. “I lost weight immediately, and it took away all the stress about eating right,” she says.

If you have a hectic schedule, but don’t want to order pizza or greasy Chinese food (again), consider prepared meal deliveries from one of these Las Vegas-based services.

Gastro Fare. Nurtured Ales. Jukebox Gold.

Music

Lovelife plays Fremont Country Club on May 22.

May 16-22, 2013

Venerable Music Mag honors local student Musicians

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students in the UNLV Music Department’s Jazz Studies program are keeping Las Vegas’s musical legacy intact.

Pick up the June 2013 issue of longtime jazz publication DownBeat and you’ll notice the UNLV kids earned a few Outstanding Performance recognitions from the magazine’s 36th annual Student Music Awards. UNLV Jazz Ensemble I was honored in the Large Ensemble category, UNLV Latin Jazz Ensemble earned distinction in the Latin Group class, and John Summers received a Best Arrangement nod for his take on Michael Brecker’s “African Skies.”

Considered the premier jazzeducation prizes in the U.S., DownBeat’s awards are judged by a panel of educators and performers. I’m told the “blind” process involves listening to number-coded audio recordings, ensuring impartiality. Makes me feel sorry for the judges, because UNLV’s student jazzers are comely! Side note: UNLV Latin Jazz Ensemble nabbed third place in the Open Combo category at April’s Monterey Jazz Fest Next Generation, a performance-based contest. Trombonist Max Acree placed frst as soloist, and sax-player Julian Tanaka cinched second.

The long-running feud between Vegas bands Escape the Fate and Falling in Reverse should escalate: The rivals release new discs within weeks of one another. Fate’s industrial-metal offering Ungrateful arrived May 14. Reverse’s hip-hop and electronica-infuenced Fashionably Late hits shelves June 18.

Fate’s original vocalist, Ronnie Radke,

was kicked out after drug problems and a battery conviction. Fate went on to release three albums with another singer. After two years in prison, Radke debuted Reverse with 2010 single Raised by Wolves. The smack talk has never abated and, with each band veering radically from the emocore template, it’ll be interesting to see who lands atop Hot Topic’s Great T-shirt Wall of Being.

Cool shows this week: Brooklyn/ Brit group Lovelife romances synthpop fans at 6:00 p.m. May 22 at Fremont Country Club. They have a slight R&B edge (they’ve been called a “goth D’Angelo”), readily apparent in latest single “Dying to Start Again,” which will appear on Lovelife’s forthcoming Stateless EP (out June 11).

Catch this band before they blow up. … The Dickies draw near! The (allegedly) frst West Coast punk act to sign with a major label, this iconic group’s roots go back to 1977. Founding guitarist Stan Lee (not the classic comicbook creator) continues to deliver fast and furious riffs, and the band’s comedy-infused melodies haven’t diminished. Hopefully they still cover the theme to Japanese cartoon Gigantor. Dig the Dickies at 8:30 p.m. May 23 at LVCS. … Also May 23: Savannah, Georgia’s Kylesa sludge-metals its way into Backstage Bar & Billiards at 8 p.m. Kylesa unveils a new album, Ultraviolet, May 28. So now is the time to see ’em shine.

Your Vegas band releasing a CD soon?

Email jarret_keene@yahoo.com.

a&e

concerts

the rolling stones

MGM Grand Garden Arena, May 11 From arena distance, where the weathered burlap of his face was obscured, he looked young and hot, having achieved—at least for the duration of the concert—the eternal youth promised at the heart of rock ’n’ roll. With gestures big enough to reach the farthest balcony seat, he cajoled the audience to move like he was a tent-revival preacher conducting an exorcism.

Keith Richards hasn’t aged as well as Jagger (at times, the 69-year-old resembled an animatronic pirate), but he made a strong showing, especially when he sang lead on “Happy.” Female highlights included Lisa Fischer’s high-octane voice on “Gimme Shelter” and Katy Perry—in thigh-highs and a leather bustier— dancing around a grinning Ronnie Wood as she made a cameo on “Beast of Burden.” Former Stones guitarist Mick Taylor appeared for a couple of songs, and Green Valley High School madrigal singers sang on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

With energetic performances and a list of well-executed hits (including “Paint it Black,” ”Honky Tonk Women,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and an extended “Midnight Rambler”), this two-hour-plus show secured attendees’ lifetime bragging rights.

But what that one kid won’t be able to say is that he saw the deeply satisfying show-ender “Satisfaction”; his parents whisked him away just as it was starting. ★★★★★ – Cindi Moon Reed

Dusty sunshine May 16-22, 2013

Beauty Bar, May 11

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The Dusty Sunshine concert, which raised money for the band’s upcoming trip to the NXNW Festival in Canada, had the air of a quaint town fair. It included a kissing booth, hot dogs and an onstage date auction that featured autoharp player Chani Riiell.

The band itself didn’t take the stage until well after 1 a.m. Dusty Sunshine played an abbreviated set of Americana that showcased their multi-instrumental talents. Reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ Oh Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack, the vocal harmonizing was earthy and haunting, and the addition of new bass player Aly Unna provided a steady backdrop for banjo, mandolin and violin flourishes. The band hit their sweet spot on the Heidi Guinn-sung “The Nest.”

All in all, they raised $3,000 toward their Canada trip. To quote another Americana artist, James McMurtry, It’s a small town, you know what I mean/It’s a small town son, and we all support the team. ★★★✩✩ – Danny Axelrod

Rolling Stones photo by Ron Koch; Dusty Sunshine photo by Adam Trujillo

Twenty years from now, some guy will brag to his twenty-something peers that he saw the Rolling Stones play at their 50 & Counting tour stop in Las Vegas. Or so his parents hoped when they bought a ticket for their small child, decked him out in protective earmuffs and lifted him into the air along to the beat.

Yes, history was being made.

Just in case the audience didn’t get the momentousness of the occasion, video testimonials by famous musicians played at the show’s beginning. Later, just in case somebody (perhaps the kiddies) didn’t understand the band’s authentic pedigree, the video screen showed clips of country blues legends while they played “All Down the Line.” To connect the dots from the past to present day, the video screen intermixed old audience footage with real-time shots of the local audience during “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It).”

Sure, those past audiences looked better, but the effect worked. It was thrilling to see that we were still a part of “it.”

While all this historical stuff made the show meaningful, the actual performance is what made it good.

The man who launched a thousand skinny-jeaned rockers, Mick Jagger, 69, appeared in all his knobby-kneed glory. His dancing, skipping, strutting, preening … and singing were tirelessly athletic.

stage

a son’s success, a DaD’s priDe at legenDs in concert

STRIP POSTSCRIPT: Extensions galore … OK, just two: Over at Vinyl at the Hard Rock, that bastion of comic gentility, Andrew Dice Clay, has extended his original March-throughMay run for another 28 shows, carrying him through September 1.

Meanwhile, at Planet Hollywood’s Peepshow, Coco Austin has, well, extended her extension. Debuting last December with a contract that took her through March, the Ice Loves Coco reality-show star re-upped through July, and now has re-re-upped, also until … September 1.

Curiously coincidental, don’cha think? … On September 2, perhaps Austin and Clay will unveil a brandnew show: Dice Loves Coco. Then its spinoff: Ice Hates Dice.

What Legends would you like to see In Concert? Email your nominees to Steve.Bornfeld@VegasSeven.com.

May 16-22, 2013

A half-grin tells you everything.

I lean in to comment on the fans’ appreciation of his son’s talent.

“He is pretty good, isn’t he?” Junior Brantley says. “Most important thing is he’s got a job and he’s out of the house!” Giggling, he pats my arm— he’s joking, but only because a joke keeps his pride from turning into bragging.

Outside the showroom, as fans crowd around performers to pose for pictures, I jostle through the throng surrounding Damian Brantley. “I sat next to your dad,” I shout over the din. His eyes open wide.

“He’s very proud of you.”

Damian’s smile reaches both ears.

His face crinkles. His eyes moisten.

“Thank you so much for telling me that, brother,” he says, squeezing my hand in both of his, as if I had given him a precious gem.

A dad’s pride is, indeed, priceless.

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DawDling at the Flamingo Showroom … ten minutes till curtain-up on the 30th anniversary performance of Legends in Concert … fddling with my phone … minding my own beeswax. … “Can I tell you an interesting story, sir?”

“Sure,” I tell the soft-spoken gentleman seated to my left.

“In this show?

The one who plays Michael Jackson?

He’s my son,” says the man who introduces himself as Junior Brantley.

“And I used to play Little Richard.”

Dads and sons. Pride ever connects them. Dads yearn to feel it. Sons want to earn it. Especially sons succeeding dads in the family business, whether it’s running the corner grocery store or performing in the impersonator show at the corner of Flamingo Road and Las Vegas Boulevard.

Once, the elder Brantley, a veteran Vegas jazz/blues pianist, did his Good-Golly-Miss-Molly act at this hotel in American Superstars. It closed in 2011. Now he sits in the audience while his son, Damian, commands the same attention in the same hotel—ferociously.

Exploding onto the stage after Rod Stewart and Britney Spears impersonators, Damian—decked out in the signature militaristic Jax uniform— sends an electric charge through the crowd. Moonwalking to claps, hoots and hollers. Leading some dancing zombies in a killer “Thriller.” Pulling off blazing moves while re-creating “Billie Jean” from the landmark Motown 25 special that rocketed Jackson into the pantheon of legends.

The son is on fre.

Six rows back, gazing up at him, Dad does not join the screaming, the shouting, the whooping around him. He wears a small, unshakable smile. Clearly, this isn’t a man given to grand emotional displays.

A&E

Movies

DiCaprio, Mulligan, Maguire and Edgerton party like it’s 1922.

Not-So-Great Gatsby’

Baz Luhrmann’s novel adaptation chooses 3-D style over substance

By Michael Phillips

May 16-22, 2013

Tribune Media Services

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even if it’s true, let’s forget the “great American novel” business regarding The Great Gatsby for a minute. What makes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, published in the spring of 1925 but set three years earlier, such a haunted portrait of a time, a place and a Lost Generation dream?

The work’s spellbinding qualities, I think, lie less with the beauty of the prose (although God knows it’s beautiful) than with the psyche of the author so eager to sum it all up and explain the Jazz Age mania and conspicuous consumption and reckless, self-deluding love. By most accounts, Fitzgerald was a touchy, insecure alcoholic (dead by 44) who craved the critical respect and popularity that, despite his success, remained just out of reach—ungraspable, like the light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s pier across the bay.

Writing about the mysterious

Jay Gatsby, through the eyes of Daisy’s cousin, Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald was wrestling with a gorgeous illusion of a man. The author, who completed Gatsby while living on the Cote d’Azur in the south of France with his fatally “colorful” wife, Zelda, never completely resolved his feelings of envy and contempt for the Gatsby crowd, nor of his own uneasy self-regard. He knew what it meant to be on the outside looking in, even when he was in.

“When I like men I want to be like them,” Fitzgerald once wrote. “I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them.

I don’t want the man; I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave him out.” We’re very close to Patricia Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley here.

None of that for director and co-adapter Baz Luhrmann. It’s

party time! Despite a few good ideas and the uniformly splendid production and costume designs by Luhrmann’s mate and partner, Catherine Martin, this frenzied adaptation of The Great Gatsby is all look and no feel.

If you liked Moulin Rouge!— Luhrmann’s hyperactive ode to Paris at the end of the 19th century—you’ll probably fnd a lot to admire here. In fragments, the look is enough. Our frst clear vision of the bootlegger?

Murderer? Stock manipulator? Gatsby, portrayed as 100 variations on the theme of Arrow Collar perfection by Leonardo DiCaprio, is beyond grand opera. On his veranda, the freworks booming behind him on cue, Gatsby turns and announces himself and bang!

Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” reaches its climax. There’s really nowhere to go from there.

And yet the story has just begun to tell itself. Working with co-writer Craig Pearce, Luhrmann invents scenes with Nick, played by a diffdent, glassy-eyed Tobey Maguire, diagnosed as “morbidly alcoholic” and drying out at a Menninger’s-type clinic, where he struggles to write his life story as it pertains to Gatsby; his beloved Kentucky debutante Daisy, played by Carey Mulligan; Daisy’s vicious and philandering husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton); and the languorous golf pro Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki).

The soundtrack for Gatsby and Daisy’s love story, much like the one heard in Moulin Rouge! and countless other flms, including Sofa Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, is gleefully way, way out of period. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter served as executive producer on Luhrmann’s flm, and the tracks range from will.I.am to Florence + the Machine. One era evokes another: The bashes remain the same, only the music changes.

The script remains quite faithful to Fitzgerald in many respects, other than the framing device of Nick in the sanatorium. The acting is not the issue here. There’s a moment in a key scene, a sweltering apartment confrontation between DiCaprio’s Gatsby and Edgerton’s Tom, when Gatsby loses his vaunted cool. It’s quick and scary and, because DiCaprio is unafraid of raw emotion, startlingly effective. And then it’s gone, and we’re back to too much computer-generated imagery (although some of the panoramas of the 1920s Manhattan skyline and of West Egg and East Egg, Long Island, are lovely); restless, hurtling editing rhythms designed to grind every conversation to a series of mini-halts; and yet another showcase for designer Martin’s pearly taste in shirts and jewelry. Shooting in 3-D, because he could, Luhrmann’s dalliance in this particular visual

universe is neither a hindrance nor a help. It’s simply more stuff, in a movie already stuffed with stuff where the dramatic stuffng should be.

My favorite Luhrmann to date wasn’t a flm at all: It was his 2002 Broadway staging of Puccini’s La Bohème, which was full of grand concepts and bold design strokes, far more selectively handled. The greatest Gatsby, besides Fitzgerald’s?

That’s easy: Gatz, the six-anda-half-hour theatrical version presented, with every word of Fitzgerald’s spoken onstage,

by Elevator Repair Service. (It played Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008.)

There the mystery of Gatsby, the illusion, and Fitzgerald, the illusion-loving literary striver, remained miraculously intact and powerful. Despite the best efforts of DiCaprio, Mulligan and Edgerton, all I really got out of Luhrmann’s movie was a half-developed notion of Gatsby as the freewheeling, vaguely psychotic auteur of his own movie. There’s always something to watch. But the actors’ efforts to get something going the old-fashioned way—by interacting with each other, in the service of the characters—get shoved to the sidelines, in favor of one more blast of glitter.

The Great Gatsby (PG-13) ★★✩✩✩

A&E

Movies

Funny PeePles

Meet the Parents knock-of follows a charming formula

By Roger Moore

Tribune Media Services

May 16-22, 2013

PeePles is an African-American Meet the Parents that slips funnyman Craig Robinson into the Ben Stiller role. Casting the musically minded Robinson in this formula comedy about screwing up your frst encounter with your potential in-laws is like replacing Stiller’s Greg Focker with Jack Black.

Yeah, that might work. And here, formulaic or not, it’s funny.

Robinson plays Wade, an entertainer for kids who sings about learning to “use your words” and not mess your pants. How he ended up with stunning United Nations lawyer Grace (Kerry Washington) takes a bit of imagination.

Until you meet her parents.

Not that she’s anxious to let Wade meet “the Chocolate Kennedys.” She does her family weekends in Sag Harbor without her live-in lover.

But Wade, egged on by his “doll doctor” brother (Malcolm Barrett, hilarious) decides to follow her to the Hamptons and surprise her and her folks with a proposal.

The moment he meets her father, “The Judge,” he realizes the folly of his plan. Judge Vir-

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gil Peeples is played by the criminally underemployed comic David Alan Grier. His patriarch is a prickly martinet who so intimidates his family of overachievers that they all lie to him rather than upset his notion of family.

Daphne, his wife (S. Epatha Merkerson in a rare comic turn), is a retired, vampy soul-singer with substanceabuse issues.

Young son Simon (Tyler James Williams of Everybody Hates Chris) is a genius and a social misfit who acts out by stealing.

Daughter Gloria (Kali Hawk) is a TV reporter who won’t tell Dad she’s in love with her camerawoman (Kimrie LewisDavis). And Dad has his own secrets, which Wade stumbles into as he blunders his way through a domestic situation fraught with peril.

Robinson (The Offce, Hot Tub Time Machine) is in his ease,

Family disunion: Kerry Washington, Craig Robinson and David Alan Grier.

here, surrounded by funny people so that he doesn’t have to carry the movie. But in reacting to every new discovery about the Peeples, and about his girlfriend’s secret past, he’s a stitch.

She’s dated a lot of rich, older men in Sag Harbor. How’d he fnd out? At the market.

“I met Uncle Ben and Bojangles up in here. Who else did you date? George Washington Carver? W.E.B. DuBois?”

Writer-director Tina Gordon Chism earned her directing debut with pretty good scripts for Drumline and ATL. She packs this one with amusing characters in awkward, if obvious, situations and makes the most of them. Tyler Perry produced Peeples, and he could take notes on how to make a lowdown, broad farce that’s never too low or too broad.

The laughs follow an overly familiar path, but it’s great to

see Grier, one of the bright lights of the seminal TV sketch comedy In Living Color, button down this judge and fnd ways to break formula and make him hilarious.

And if these Peeples don’t make Robinson a comic leading man, they at least predict a comic franchise that Perry can produce without having to don a dress.

Peeples (PG-13) ★★★✩✩

short reviews

The Big Wedding (R) ★★✩✩✩

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is back, keeping the Disney/Marvel behemoth franchise alive and well. The climactic alien melee in last year’s all-star reunion The Avengers has left Stark nerve-racked and an insomniac workaholic. A new global terrorist known as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) has oozed onto the scene, destroying Stark’s house, slaughtering innocent civilians, etc. Stark flees to rural Tennessee, where he befriends a bullied 8-year-old (Ty Simpkins) who becomes his tagalong and sometime savior.

This ensemble wedding comedy is enjoyable for its actors and little else. Don (Robert De Niro) is living with a caterer (Susan Sarandon) and was previously married to Ellie (Diane Keaton). Their adopted son, Alejandro (Ben Barnes), has two siblings (Katherine Heigl, Topher Grace). A big wedding ensues that brings about all sorts of slapstick interactions, pretending and the like. The actors here are pros and deliver some small moments, but all in all, it’s meh.

Jurassic Park 3-D (PG-13) ★★★✩✩

Pain & Gain (R) ★✩✩✩✩

Oblivion (PG-13) ★★✩✩✩

42 (PG-13) ★★★✩✩

In the latest Tom Cruise star vehicle, Jack Harper is a Mr. Fix-It in the year 2077, living and working high above what’s left of Earth after a devastating war with invading aliens.

Most of the population has been relocated to a Saturn moon, except for the “scavs” led by Morgan Freeman. Jack knows something’s up when his boss, Sally (Melissa Leo), orders him to stay away from a crash-landing site. Of course he goes and rescues the lone survivor who just happens to be the woman from his dreams. No really. It’s interesting, but very slow.

Michael Bay never ceases to amaze.

This groaner follows Danny Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), bodybuilder and gym manager. Lugo and his hapless colleagues (Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie) target a Colombian gym client (Tony Shalhoub) for kidnapping and extortion.

He’s tortured, then crushed by a vehicle and left for dead. But he doesn’t die. Others do, later, but not him. Bay is largely terrible as a filmmaker, and comedy is not in his wheelhouse.

This carefully tended portrait of Jackie Robinson, the man who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier, settles for too little.

Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) endures long odds and societal racism to join the Brooklyn Dodgers. Harrison Ford is fun as the general manager who brought him up, Branch Rickey. The film treads too carefully, a primer, a story that protects and enshrines Robinson. It feels like a production watched very carefully by his survivors. Boseman is highly capable, but the filmmakers failed to ask much of him.

May 16-22, 2013

This Spielberg classic is back, with its lunging raptors and roaring T. rexes now in 3-D. The result is great, since the film has always been so much more powerful on the big screen than on TV. When tycoon John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) creates an isolated theme park where he has back-engineered dinosaurs to life, a group of visiting scientists gets caught running for their lives when the attractions escape their cages. It really is a fun movie, and the dinos were made for 3-D.

115 VEGAS SEVEN

Iron Man 3 (PG-13) ★★★✩✩

Marketplace

7 questions

Linda Quinn

The Discovery Children’s Museum boss on her career path, the rebirth of her facility and what our museum community is lacking

By David G. Schwartz

As A onetime CPA, Linda Quinn certainly knows how to crunch numbers. But these days, when the Discovery Children’s Museum’s CEO cracks open the books, she probably has to crunch the numbers a few times, just to make sure they’re accurate.

That’s because since moving from the city’s Cultural Corridor to its new digs in Symphony Park, the museum has been a huge hit—so much so that in the six weeks since the March 9 reopening, Quinn says the museum sold as many memberships as it had in the previous year. And over the eight days of spring break, the museum welcomed more guests than in any previous month. “We are seeing 4½ times more volume than at the old facility,” she says.

Thanks to a new space that’s about twice the size of the old one, Quinn projects the museum—which has exhibits geared toward children ages 12 and under (but with programs for teenagers as well)—will surpass 300,000 visitors this year, which would more than double last year’s attendance of 140,000. For Quinn—a law school graduate with a passion for education—the real value of the museum’s success isn’t financial but social: The Discovery Museum, along with being a fun outing, is a vibrant place to learn in a community that desperately needs such places.

May 16-22, 2013

You moved to Las Vegas from Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2006. What were your frst thoughts when you got here?

Thank goodness! I was so happy to see mountains—I’ve always loved mountains of any kind, so that was my frst reaction. Then, within a short period, I had someone do something kind for me, which felt very Southern in nature.

Within two weeks I felt like I was at home.

Of course, losing all of that North Carolina greenery was an adjustment, but from a community perspective, I acclimated quickly.

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How did a former CPA who also has a law degree wind up with a career in museums?

After I graduated from law school I needed a job, so I stepped into nonprofits. My first nonprofit job was with the American Red Cross. I loved it. I loved bringing my business background into a mission-oriented job and the feeling of my work being

so meaningful. So it was really a natural progression to step into the museum world, which is all about children being happy and families having fun. You make them having a good time the basis of an educational experience.

It spoke to a real core value for me, so I was home.

What’s the purpose of a children’s museum?

To ignite a passion for learning in an informal setting. It’s different from what a teacher in a school can do.

We give them a hands-on approach, letting them get a feel for a concept by interacting with it physically.

How has the museum changed with the new facility?

From a facility standpoint, we went from more big, open floors and moved into galleries. The new museum consists of nine galleries over three stories instead of two floors that housed more than 100 component exhibits. From

another perspective, instead of component exhibits, each gallery is themed, so you learn within a particular themed gallery such as Toddler Town, Young at Art, Fantasy Festival or Patents Pending, to name a few.

The galleries give parents an opportunity to contain children, and it helps with noise level.

It also helps us with programming, as each gallery is designed around our core education values of arts, science and early childhood development.

What’s been the most unexpected outcome since the museum relocated?

To some degree, the success we’re having. Naturally, we had planned for success—to be bigger and better—and now we’re here, but seeing it happen to [such] a degree is a pleasant surprise. It creates new challenges but good challenges.

The community has really embraced us, much to our delight.

What’s the one museum Las Vegas needs most?

Good question. I think the trick here is we have a lot of good museums that people don’t know about. So it’s not that we’re really missing something as much as we need to do a better job collaboratively of telling people about what really is here.

More diffcult: passing the bar exam or the CPA exam?

[Laughs.] I honestly didn’t sit for the bar exam, so I can’t answer that one. I can tell you the CPA exam was no fun.