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March 27–April 2, 2014
Can a Las Vegas legend bring new magic to Shakespeare’s Tempest ? March 27–April 2, 2014
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23 VEGAS SEVEN
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March 27–April 2, 2014
utside the tent, a desert tempest rages. Inside, it smells like circus elephants. The foor is dirt, formerly the lawn just outside The Smith Center. But all around, it’s Shakespeare’s world. ¶ Welcome to rehearsals for a very peculiar production of The Tempest, about fve weeks before opening night. The vibe is laid-back creative chaos, with a homespun feel. The set looks like a Depression-era Coney Island carnival sideshow. Heck, the whole stage appears to have been left outside during the Dust Bowl, giving it a sort of marooned-chic appeal. It looks like a found object, a treasure that washed up onto a beach fully formed, peeking from the sand. ¶ An elfn magician paces the lot, disappearing and reappearing with a small bouquet of plastic fowers. He will play the airy spirit Ariel. An actor practices twisting and tossing a fedora on his head. A dwarf who will play Trinculo the jester chats by the water cooler. Several dancers stretch and contort on a gymnastics crash pad while following along the dialogue for Act V in open notebooks. An orange cherry picker looms in the back corner of the tent. ¶ The famously silent magician Teller, of Penn & Teller fame, is curled up on the stairs leading up to the stage. He watches intently. From close range, he looks cuddly, like a little boy in footie pajamas observing his parents’ grown-up party. But he’s not as short as one would imagine from photos of him next to the 6-foot-6 Penn Jillette. Nor is Teller, at 66, any sort of child. In fact, Teller is one of the most grown-up grown-ups you will ever meet. The erudite tea-drinker is Las Vegas’ most under-the-radar public intellectual. He writes book reviews for The New York Times and makes movies about art techniques, such as the just-released Tim’s Vermeer. And he loves Shakespeare.
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“Most people’s frst contact with Shakespeare is an English class, and there couldn’t be a worse place to encounter Shakespeare,” Teller says. “To read Shakespeare is like handing an orchestral score to a teenage kid and saying, ‘Now imagine this symphony.’ This is just the directions for the performers; this is not something you were meant to read.” Teller intends to right this theatrical wrong through a dream-team collaboration with director Aaran Posner, the American Repertory Theater, the Connecticut-based Pilobolus dance company, and songwriting duo Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. In addition to conjuring the concept with Posner, Teller is co-directing the play and creating the magic. This version of The Tempest will be, as Teller wrote in a letter to patrons, “Harry Potter exacting vigilante justice with illusions.” “We’re doing the play how Shakespeare would have done if he’d had the technical capacity to do magic this heavily,” Teller says. “In conventional productions of The Tempest, people just talk and walk on and off the stage. In our version, if they should appear, they appear. If they should disappear, they disappear. If they should transform from one person to another or levitate, they do that.” “The Tempest is Shakespeare’s great play about magic. So who better in the world to think about a great magician than Teller? It’s a perfect match,” says Stephen Greenblatt, a Harvard Shakespeare professor and longtime friend of Teller. The professor plans to take his students to see this production when it moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts, after its Las Vegas debut. “One of the odd things about Shakespeare’s play is that Prospero’s magic comes from a very intense engagement in books. One of the things that strikes anybody about Teller is that for a popular entertainer he’s an unusually learned man, so there’s that connection.”
Teller has spent half his life contemplating The Tempest, and he has no small ambitions for this play. “If we pull it off, it could be a stunningly beautiful thing,” he says. “It could very well be the very best Tempest ever—including Shakespeare’s. It could certainly be the very best Tempest of our time.”
next year, penn & teller will celebrate their 40th anniversary as collaborators. In that much time, they’ve grown from magic’s outsiders to elder statesmen. The duo met in the mid-1970s, cut their teeth on the Renaissance fair circuit, scored their frst off-Broadway show in ’85, debuted in Vegas in ’93, began their residency at the Rio—where they still perform fve nights a week—in ’01, did Showtime’s Penn & Teller: Bullshit! for eight years in the aughts, earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in ’13, and in general have what Variety describes as a “Penn & Teller Empire,” with beachheads in theater, flm, books and TV. The Monkey Room backstage at the Rio is a visual timeline of the duo’s success. The elaborate green room is both intimate and public, like a model home if it were built by a circus. There’s zebra-print furniture and surrealist touches: a table with mannequin lady legs and a gilded mirror sprouting feminine arms. Today there is also a cake from the casino on the coffee table (a glass slab supported by reclining monkey statues) because it is Penn’s 59th birthday. The simian theme seems to be both a reference to the duo’s belief in atheism and evolution as well as an acknowledgement that we’re all performing monkeys—not just the two magicians, but all of us, the celebrities, the journalists, the lady who delivers pre-show sandwiches on a
rolling cart, the unseen audience that will fll the 1,450-seat showroom in the Penn & Teller Theater. The red walls of the green room are adorned with memorabilia from their epic career. Photos show Penn & Teller with David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Liberace, Run-DMC (smirking on the set of the rappers’ 1986 music video “It’s Tricky,” in which the magicians starred). TV stills reveal their pop cultural reach: dumping 500 live cockroaches on David Letterman’s desk; performing a trick with Madonna on Saturday Night Live; Teller playing a pet cat in an episode of the sitcom Dharma & Greg. In the middle of the celebrity display is a large abstract painting by Teller’s artist father, Joe Teller. “Not his best work,” Teller says, “but it matched the colors of the room.” On another wall hang the Playbills and fiers from the early days—before their 20 years in Vegas, back when they had no solidifed logo, when it was just their names and the phrase “bad boys of magic.” Going back even further is the framed memorabilia from the ’70s, when it was Penn, Teller and Wier Chrisemer as the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, offering “magic, music, juggling & comedy” with the tagline: “Three deeply troubled young men who think it’s funny” and advertising “100 needles swallowed, Bach on xylophone, knives juggled.” Chrisemer had top billing. “Teller is certainty one of the top fve magical minds alive,” Penn says. “By the way, I am not on that list.” Penn is famous for saying that he has no affection for Teller. In his typical style, he repeats a bombastic discounting of their personal relationship while complimenting Teller’s talent, professionalism and work ethic. “[It’s] strictly cold, cerebral, intellectual, calculated on both our parts,” he says. “Now, after a lifetime of working together, he is my closest friend, I suppose. We don’t slide into that very
often—our parents’ death, my children’s births, that might be about it. … I would say one night a week, after the show we’re both eating our supper, no one is around, we might chat a little bit. … The Penn & Teller story really does lack romance. There’s no Martin and Lewis, no Lennon and McCartney ups and downs. No Jagger and Richards hating each other and coming back. It’s just two guys plodding along. We’re not geniuses, we’re just worker bees. We’re a partnership for one simple reason: We believe we do better stuff together than we do separately. The Tempest is an exception to that. Let’s say that I do better stuff with Teller than I do alone.” (Teller generally shares Penn’s views on their alliance: “I’ve worked with Penn for nearly 40 years, and we disagree about everything all the time. And I think that’s wonderful, because if you get two people who agree all the time you’re not going to get something better than either of them can achieve.”) Behind Penn’s grandstanding hides a true admiration for his partner: “So much of what makes Penn & Teller Penn & Teller is Teller. The visual aspect and the taste is so much Teller. If we didn’t have each other, Teller might still be a Latin teacher doing wonderful magic on the side. I would probably be a morning DJ.” Since, according to Penn, Teller is the “visual one,” it seems logical that he designed this Monkey Room. But with magicians, deceit is commonplace. “Even this room is a lie,” Teller says. “It was designed by a reality show.”
teller likes to say he’s been dreaming about The Tempest for 30 years and working on the play for fve. In this case, he’s referring to an actual dream, not some vague aspiration. In 1977, not long after “Penn and Wier
When an audience comes in, they shouldn’t have to work. We should do all the work for them. We should make it easy for them to know who is whom, what’s going on, what people’s purpose is. And they should laugh a lot.” Posner: “I would disagree, as we do a lot, in the best possible way. I disagree that we want to do all the work for the audience. I want to make sure that the audience has a clear way in and that we are taking care of them. But I want to make sure that we are enlisting their imaginations in a really unique and effective way.” Kent: “We’re talking into the wind a little bit. We’re not doing something that’s mapped out already, which I think is the purpose of having people who have different ways of thinking.” When discussing the production, Teller is serious, precise, strict even. A bit of that old high school teacher comes out. Then Posner says that he wants to comment on record about Teller and Kent, but he doesn’t want them to hear. Suddenly, Teller is playful. He holds up a fannel shirt as an impromptu curtain and hums and dances a small jig behind it, while Posner, the unintentional straight man, whispers earnestly about Kent’s and Teller’s genius. “We have a lot of geniuses working on this show,” Posner says. “Shakespeare, Tom Waits, Teller and Matt [Kent]—I would put all of them in the genius category. I am a craftsperson taking that genius and making sure it stays as a cohesive whole.”
March 27–April 2, 2014
Penn & Teller through the years: At the Rio, on the Renaissance festival circuit, and with Iggy Pop and David Bowie in 1985.
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pried me out of [teaching] and had me doing street performing for cash,” Teller dreamed that he was the deposed wizard. “I dreamed I was Prospero, and I dreamed that the way I controlled my enemies was by changing the world around them with my shows. I dreamed I could make you behave differently by making you see something other than this room around you. I wasn’t acting directly on you; I was changing the world as you perceive it. That’s all I remember of it. I don’t remember any plot, just that one strange element. That’s always been in the back of my mind as one of the interpretations of this play.” In high school, Teller memorized and performed Prospero’s “Ye Elves of Hills” monologue for a drama competition. “When [the actor who plays] Prospero is going over that speech and misses a word, I’m the one instantly cueing him,” Teller says, “because I’ve known it since I was 15.” The monologue comes toward the end of The Tempest; in it, the wizard considers his magical accomplishments (“Graves at my command have waked their sleepers … by my so potent art”) and then decides to forfeit his powers in order to take care of his daughter, Miranda (“But this rough magic I here abjure … I’ll break my staff … I’ll drown my book.”). A pre-silent Teller won the drama competition and went on to remember the wizard’s heartbreak forever. “That’s where this play tugs at me—to think about what it would take for me to give up magic,” Teller says. “You can see how much I love doing this. What would it take for me to give that up and say this other thing is more im-
portant? I don’t have children, and I don’t intend to because I don’t think I could do this with this much gusto if I had to consider real life.” So you chose magic over Miranda? “Yes, but I chose magic over having Miranda,” he says. “If I’d had Miranda, my decision may have been very different.”
at the dinner break during The Tempest rehearsal—the rain has ceased; the elephant smell has dissipated—Posner, Pilobolus choreog-
rapher Matt Kent and Teller speak about The Tempest: Posner: “It’s been a series of concentric circles opening out. It took us well over a year to cast this show in a variety of cities. We have a constant guide and beacon, which is Shakespeare. Even the coolest magic trick, most brilliant movement piece, even the best song might go away if it doesn’t get to the center of the story we’re telling.” Teller: “I’ve seen a lot of productions of this play that are awful. It’s not an awful play, but it’s a play that’s confusing if you don’t take a lot of trouble.
there is a bit in penn & teller’s show at the Rio in which Penn plays the guitar while talk-singing a countryblues song about theoretical physics. Penn narrates while Teller illustrates the complexities of the universe with a deck of cards—fanning them, making them appear and disappear and even shooting them out into the audience. It is, without a doubt, the most intellectual moment in all of Las Vegas tourist entertainment. Before beginning, Penn requests that the audience go easy on them because the trick—called “Atheist Deck of Cards”—is new. The post-show chatter in line for the women’s restroom is laudatory. In the lobby, crowds of delighted fans encircle Penn and Teller for their habitual meet and greet. The two performers stand a distance away from each other to make room for all the people; they are twin suns with their own orbiting solar systems. Penn’s star is slightly larger, but Teller’s admirers are no less ardent. Despite his silent stage persona, Teller chats with fans, charms them, holds their cellphone cameras and clicks countless group selfes, saying that he “knows his role.” When the last fan has been greeted, Teller crosses the cavernous lobby and passes through an inconspicuous door that leads backstage and to his dressing room—much smaller and messier than the Monkey Room, a cozy place with
fooling the audience is to spend “more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.” Even though Teller is now considered one of the best magicians of all time, this rule still applies to him. To master “Atheist Deck of Cards,” Teller practices every evening before the show. He stands in a specially rigged backstage room and he does “that card shooting stuff, which is hard as holy hell.” “Tonight I am real good at it,” he says. “I’ve been good at it for three or four days now. But when I frst did it, I would get a misfre. Magic is not a forgiving art form. It’s a miracle or it’s ludicrous. There is no middle point, no almost-miracle. An almostmiracle is ludicrous.” Teller is a man of full-on miracles. Johnny Thompson, Penn & Teller’s 79-year-old magic consultant, knows this best. He’s also probably the only person in the world who views Teller, an
Teller is certainty one of the top five magical minds alive, Penn says. By the way, I am not on that list. table, a little paranoid” after his mentor died. But even though Rosey is not here to see the vastness of Teller’s artistic empire, he was able to witness “that cardinal moment of our careers” when Penn & Teller debuted off-Broadway in 1985. Rosey performed as openingnight entertainment, playing “Satan masquerading as a party magician.” Teller talks until he is visibly exhausted and his melodious voice falters. It’s after midnight. Tomorrow he has a 10 a.m. meeting with co-director Posner, press events and rehearsals until 8 p.m. Then it’s back to the Rio for his 9 p.m. show. “Spare time is nonexistent between now and April 4,” he says. “If you’re a friend of mine, consider me away on tour.”
in a 2012 article for smithsonian magazine titled “Teller Reveals His Secrets,” Teller wrote that the trick to
only child, as a little brother. “I’m always safe in inventing something for him,” Thompson says, “because I know he can do it, no matter how diffcult it is.” Few people get to see one of Teller’s most intricate feats: his home. Teller’s angular desert house is like Prospero’s island. It’s the haunted wizard’s lair in the wilderness. It’s also a refection of the magician son of an artist father. Teller loves shape and form and symmetry; his home is flled with architectural magic. There’s a hallway built to look longer than it is, leading some guests to walk into the wall. The dining room table features a skeleton that screams when stretched. There’s a Houdini room with no visible exits, a moving bookcase, magic books galore and a talking bear statue in the backyard that guesses the card in your pocket. Teller’s visitors often sample his pancakes, waffes or custards. Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim ate his pear-almond waffes. Tempest co-direc-
tor Posner had a pumpkin fan from a recipe Teller found in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Penn & Teller’s production consultant Joel Fischman sampled carrot waffes during a business meeting. And when Fischman’s daughter got married, Teller sent her a waffemaker as a wedding present. “I don’t have it in me to be a real chef, but the area of breakfasts foods is a manageable area to become an expert in,” says Teller, who owns two different sizes of waffe irons. “So one of my few things in the real world that I deal with competently is the making of breakfast foods. And I like to know— in the same way that I like you to see the band onstage—the materials in my breakfast foods. I do not like to buy pancake mixes. People are endlessly sending me gifts of pancake mixes.” This month, as part of a charity campaign, Hash House a Go Go is serving Teller’s recipe for honey-orange pancakes. They are made with yogurt, four, honey, orange juice and orange zest, but Teller says Hash House’s version doesn’t taste the same as when he makes them at home. “I’m not sure that they use as much honey as I do,” Teller says. “You put a pancake that has a lot of honey in it on a griddle so it slightly burns, so it has a little edge of bitterness that goes with the sweetness of the pancake. I’m not sure they quite got that right.” Trust Teller to always work until he gets it just right. “It’s the satisfaction of being able to make something that’s beautifully delicious that you can then devour,” he says. “It’s an artistic satisfaction.”
tom nelis—the tall, elegant actor who plays Prospero—is not a magician. But Teller and his team work continually to help him learn what Teller calls “some fairly diffcult magic.” It involves sleight of hand and juggling while acting in a pivotal scene. The team choreographs the magic to the actor’s natural stance and movements. But even with the aid of expert magicians, it all comes down to one thing for Nelis: practice. “We were in there yesterday, and he was doing this [diffcult] trick he does with his wand at the end of the show,” Teller says. “He was over to one side doing it over and over again. I came to him and worked with him for a while. I went away, came back, worked on it for a while [longer]. These things are things you have to learn and get in your blood and do them a zillion times. We don’t keep the props there. We say, ‘Take that home with you, and while you’re watching TV, do it another 200 times.’ It’s the only way to do it.”
March 27–April 2, 2014
glass of grain alcohol and Coca-Cola and cigarettes and looking like the devil himself.” He was “a magician who loved The Tempest, who loved Macbeth, [who taught me to] think about magic theoretically and to think about magic, theater and acting as one thing.” “Teller saw himself—and, I think, justifably—as among the greats,” Rosenbaum told The New Yorker’s Calvin Trillin for a 1989 profle of Penn & Teller, back when Teller’s status as “among the greats” was not yet solidifed. “The single name has something to do with that: There was a great magician named Heller and a great magician named Kellar. The kind of success that Teller’s vision insisted upon seems too grandiose to be possible. It looks like a fantasy. You need gall to think you can do it.” Trillin credits Penn with having “gall enough for two,” but certainly Rosey’s infuence was just as important. For three years, Teller was “jumpy, irri-
27 THE TEMPEST April 1-27, The Smith Center, $25 and up, 749-2000, TheSmithCenter.com.
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mirrors, a closet and posters for some of his past shows. There’s the 2008 production of Macbeth, Teller’s frst collaboration with Posner. There’s Play Dead, the magical spook show he created with sideshow master Todd Robbins, which ran off-Broadway, then at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse and is now being pitched for TV. Having changed from his signature gray suit into comfy clothes and with a very frothy cappuccino in hand, Teller reiterates his desire to make a “Tempest for everybody.” Considering his magical explanation of physics, this goal seems quite plausible. Assuming the role of the anti-teacher (one who nonetheless won’t hesitate to correct your grammar), Teller describes how he and Posner cut down and clarifed Shakespeare’s “upholstered language,” which was purposefully repetitive to accommodate the chaotic environment of the 1600s-era theater. “Shakespeare puts the same idea in three or four times, so if you happen to miss it because you were being solicited by a hooker, you would still know where you are in the play,” Teller says. Take the scene, for example, when Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, gets engaged to Prince Ferdinand. As an engagement gift, Prospero puts on a show for the young couple. “In the traditional version, Prospero calls on spirits that represent Roman goddesses, and they sing and recite,” Teller says. “It’s very nice, but it’s not very good for today’s audience.” In place of “endless couplets about procreation and spring,” Teller’s Tempest offers a father-daughter magic act in which Prospero levitates his daughter and while she’s foating, presents her hand to Ferdinand. “It’s like the two of them have worked on a magic show for many years and this is her last performance,” Teller says. “It’s bittersweet and extremely beautiful, and it’s done to the exquisite Waits song called ‘Shiny Things.’ It’s this song about how crows collect things that are precious to them to put in their nest, and that’s the way the singer wants to regard the person being sung to—as the precious thing in the nest. It’s perfect from the frst moment we pantomimed it in our workshop. We all just sat in the auditorium and wept.” Teller stirs his coffee, which turns out not to be coffee at all but cottage cheese. At this quiet moment, the magician’s triumph is most apparent: The Philadelphia-raised man who shortened his name from Raymond Joseph Teller in college is hanging out backstage after headlining a long-running residency in Las Vegas; framed fan art covers a nearby wall. This is superstardom on a harpsichord-loving intellectual’s own terms: Teller is living the life that his late mentor, high school drama teacher David G. Rosenbaum—Teller calls him Rosey—had envisioned for him (and perhaps even wished for himself). Teller describes Rosey as “this very deep friend and mentor who had always been there with his
NIGHTLIFE
Mark Eteson broadcasts the sounds of Hakkasan By Deanna Rilling
March 27–April 2, 2014
Strong Support
IF YOU DON’T already know the name Mark Eteson, you still might have heard the British DJ/producer’s work. Previously with dance-music brand Godskitchen, Eteson is now not only a resident at Hakkasan and host of the club’s new podcast, as well as his own, Highways, but also the voice of festivals such as Global Gathering. Eteson serves as the warm-up act at Hakkasan, meaning he’s faced with one of the most challenging time slots in town.
29 VEGAS SEVEN
PHOTO BY K ARL L ARSON/POWERS IMAGERY
Your city after dark, photos from the week’s hottest parties and how EDC Mexico differs from our version
NIGHTLIFE
You’ve leaned more toward playing trance in the past. Describe your musical evolution. Production-wise, I’ve always made trance. The popularity has grown and gone more commercial, which is going to bring more people into dance music, and I see the good side of that. A lot of other people were moaning that dance music should stay underground and shouldn’t be as popular, but I think it’s great. My music had to change when I came over [from England], especially to Vegas. I had to adapt a bit more. I’m still going to stay true to my original roots, but I’ve always played a variety of stuff anyway. What are the greatest rewards as well as the challenges that come with playing a supporting role right before the headliners at Hakkasan? The greatest reward is the names that are on the lineup. It’s an honor to be playing alongside some of these names; they are the biggest in the industry. I feel very privileged to be there. I wouldn’t say “lucky,” because it was very hard to get to this point, but I do know how fortunate I am to be in this club. It’s diffcult to be a supporting act because we have to walk a very, very tight line between not outdoing the main act and also not playing anything that they might play. Within 15 minutes or half an hour of them coming on, we have to dial it back down, but we have to keep the crowd interested so they don’t leave before the headliner comes on. The support act can be the most rewarding and the most challenging at the same time, but if you get it right, it’s a great feeling.
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Mark Eteson works his magic at Hakkasan.
“A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE WERE MOANING THAT DANCE MUSIC SHOULD STAY UNDERGROUND AND SHOULDN’T BE AS POPULAR, BUT I THINK IT’S GREAT.”
Do you have any of your own upcoming productions that you’re able to work into the mix? I’m working on new productions at the moment. My latest one is called “Aventus,” and that’s a traditional trance track. That one’s got really good support like having been played by Above & Beyond and on Armin [van Buuren’s] show. But my production style has changed with my sound. I’ve got another track I’m fnishing off, which is having vocals written for it with another guy back in England, that will be coming out later in the year. For more with Eteson on his Godskitchen and Global Gathering days, visit VegasSeven.com/marketeson.
PHOTO BY K ARL L ARSON/POWERS IMAGERY
March 27–April 2, 2014
What are the similarities and differences between your own show, Highway, and the Hakkasan podcast? I stopped doing Highway about six or seven months ago, knowing that I was coming over here. Obviously we have to play music from our acts at the club, but other than that, they’ve given me complete [freedom] on what I want to play. Hakkasan doesn’t play drum and bass, so I’m not going to play a drum and bass track in there, but other than that, I’ve got a wealth of music that we do play, including some of the deeper lounge-y type vibe from the restaurant all the way through to the slamming main-room stuff. I play a cross section of that. The beginning of the Hakkasan podcast, you can hear stuff that you can imagine hearing if you were on a boat in Miami, and then in the middle of it you’re going to hear stuff from Calvin or Tiësto or any of our other headliners.
NIGHTLIFE
PARTIES
STK
The Cosmopolitan [ UPCOMING ]
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See more photos from this gallery at SPYONVegas.com
PHOTOS BY BOBBY JAMEIDAR
March 27–April 2, 2014
March 31 Magnum Mondays April 7 Magnum Mondays
NIGHTLIFE
PARTIES
LAX Luxor
[ UPCOMING ]
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See more photos from this gallery at SPYONVegas.com
PHOTOS BY BOBBY JAMEIDAR
March 27–April 2, 2014
March 27 DJ Shred and Mike Bless spin March 28 DJ Wellman and Mike Bless spin March 29 DJ Wellman and Mike Bless spin
Thomas Keller refects on his empire afer several major landmarks By Al Mancini
PHOTO BY SABIN ORR
➧ THOMAS KELLER, PERHAPS AMERICA’S FINEST CHEF, was in town earlier this year to host the 10th anniversary of Bouchon, his restaurant in the Venetian. It’s just one of the reasons the chef has been celebrating lately. “It really reinforces for all of us, in our restaurants and our group, that we’re doing the right thing,” he says. “Because people are still coming to our restaurants 10, 15, 20 years later.” His Yountville, California, fagship, The French Laundry, will turn 20 on July 6; sister restaurant Per Se celebrated 10 years in New York in February; and the original Bouchon in Yountville hit the 15-year mark on October 14.
For more with Thomas Keller, visit VegasSeven.com/ThomasKeller
March 27–April 2, 2014
The Keller Effect
For Keller, the only U.S. chef to helm two three-star Michelin restaurants—French Laundry and Per Se— these are more than just milestones. They are a reminder that his legacy is defned not only by dedication to his craft but also his impact on future generations of cooks. To maintain his high standards, Keller trains the young chefs and managers who will be leading his restaurants for years down the road. “I’ve always associated restaurants with sports franchises,” he says by way of comparison. “And one of our responsibilities is assuring that we are preparing the next generation of leaders today.” The French Laundry’s Michael Minnillo, for example, began his career there 18 years ago as a cook, moved to the front of the house at Per Se, and fnally returned to the Laundry as general manager. Then there’s Bouchon’s new head chef, Josh Crain. He worked for eight years at the original Bouchon in Yountville, eventually rising to the position of chef de cuisine. He left the organization with his mentor’s blessing to run Michael Mina’s Nobhill and Sea Blue in MGM Grand. After briefy moving to Mina’s American Fish in Aria, he returned to the Keller family last year to serve as Bouchon at the Venetian’s chef de cuisine. “To see him go to Las Vegas, I had great pride in that,” Keller says of his protégé. “He was going to work for Michael, one of my colleagues, somebody whom I have great respect for and certainly somebody for whom the profession has great respect. So it was really beautiful to see [Crain] make that transition and do so well with Michael. And then to invite him back and have him come back was truly wonderful. Because it really represents these generational aspects.” Clearly, there’s a sense of family in Keller’s organization, which is something the chef wanted to preserve when he expanded to the East Coast. He installed a live video feed between the kitchens in the French Laundry and Per Se, so the staffs were in constant contact. “It’s about having two restaurants, two groups of individuals, that share a common goal and vision,” he says. It’s been so successful, a similar system now links together the staffs of the Bouchons in Yountville, Las Vegas and Beverly Hills. Despite his strong team and an almost unparalleled string of success, Keller isn’t looking to expand his empire much further. He’s considering opening another New York City restaurant that would be part of what he calls “an historic project.” Other than that, “there’s nothing really on my radar.” For now, the anniversaries keep coming, and for Keller, they “symbolize a culture and philosophy that leads to success as it relates to guests who come back, and the memories that we create.”
55 VEGAS SEVEN
SCENE
A&E
CONCERT
March 27–April 2, 2014
PRETTY SWEDE, IF YOU ASK ME: Swedish indie rockers the Sounds have been making music for more than 15 years, and they sound better than ever. Their fifth album, Weekend, dropped in October, and if you haven’t thought much about the band since continuously playing “Tony the Beat” back in 2006, it’s time to refocus your attention. Keyboardist Jesper Anderberg calls it a “back to basics album” on the band’s website, and songs such as “Shake Shake Shake” and “Great Day” capture the energy of the group’s live shows. The Sounds play House of Blues on March 28 ($22), and at some point in the show, frontwoman Maja Ivarsson will implore you to change your way and shake shake shake with somebody like me. When that invitation comes, you better get to shaking.
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ON SALE NOW: Citizen Cope kicks off his all-acoustic mini-tour with an intimate show at Vinyl on April 18 ($26-$36). I’m a sucker for older tunes “Let the Drummer Kick” and “Bullet and a Target,” but new songs such as “One Lovely Day” and “Something to Believe In” are just as bluesy and soulful as anything he’s ever recorded.
PFX: The Pink Floyd Experience, Reynolds Hall, March 19 With David Gilmour and Roger Waters unlikely to ever reunite again as Pink Floyd, it’s been up to tribute acts such as PFX to keep the British rockers’ music alive for audiences. PFX has been one of the best at this for 10 years, but their stop here on the Greatest Hits and Rarities Tour Part II revealed a few flaws. The six-man lineup faithfully re-created Pink Floyd’s space-rock “rarities,” such as show openers “Astronomy Domine,” “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Fearless,” while saxophonist Jesse Molloy energized “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Echoes” as colorful backdrops danced behind the band. But it was on some of the “hits” where the band missed the mark. Newest PFX member Randy McStine is a talented guitarist and vocalist, but his delivery was too upbeat on songs such as “Money” and “Pigs On the Wing 2” that address themes such as greed, despair and alienation. Pink Floyd created some of the most enduring songs of the last 45 years, but PFX didn’t convey the darkness behind those melancholy classics. ★★✩✩✩ – Sean DeFrank
We Want to Believe By Kurt C. Rice
AUGUSTUS GLADSTONE IS a pale, endearing and clumsily genteel middle-aged crackpot who claims to be a vampire born in 1856. And the "documentary" exploring the nature of his existence is partially flmed in Las Vegas.
In Gladstone’s bright and pleasantly cluttered apartment where he squats in a condemned Portland, Oregon, hotel, we listen to his frsthand account of the 1900 Paris Exposition, his discontent with a vampire support group
and his efforts to map his family tree. Gladstone becomes convinced he has discovered a living relative, a thin African-American man named Lucky Gladstone, who works in a Las Vegas casino. So he and the flm crew hop a jet to McCarran Airport. But hilarity does not ensue. Writer and director Robyn Miller, co-creator of the 1990s computer video-game sensation Myst, keeps things vague and gives us time to refect on the nature and relevance of belief. In the film’s “person-on-the street” interviews, people are asked about life after death. One fellow explains that we don’t die, we just “go to the next level of life”; another believes we go to a “beautiful place, to be with God” but doesn’t believe in vampires, since they “aren’t anywhere in the Bible.” Gladstone is so openly kind, we lean in to embrace any shred of possibility that he might actually be what he says he is. Jimmy Chen, Gladstone’s estranged friend, speaks for all of us when he says “I wanted to believe. I wished that it was true. I think I had happy delusions.” The flm is available online on April 1, for $5.59 at TheImmortalAugustusGladstone.com.
PFX BY GLENN BROGAN
LEGENDARY: I’m mad as hell at John Legend, but not because he’s talented, good-looking and successful. I’m not even miffed that he stole Chrissy Teigen away from me, because Legend is clearly the better man. No, I’m angry with Mr. John Q. Legend because he had to go and write the sweet song “All of Me” and dedicate it to his wife, which means any nice thing I do for women (flowers, chocolates, a fancy dinner) is going to pale by comparison. John Legend plays The Smith Center on March 27 ($29-$110), and I fully intend to have a word with him after the show.
Need For Speed (PG-13) ★★✩✩✩
Need for Speed is based on the Electronic Arts gaming franchise begun in 1994. When the actors are in cars, the movie’s fun. When they get out to argue or seethe, it’s uh-oh time. Happily, there’s a refreshing emphasis on actual stunt driving over digital absurdities. Tobey’s our hero, the brooding garage mechanic and street racer played by Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad. Need for Speed isn’t much, but the story by George Gatins and John Gatins knows where it’s coming from and which movies to pilfer from.
Mr. Peabody & Sherman (PG) ★★✩✩✩
300: Rise of an Empire (R) ★★✩✩✩
Even with a change in directors and a halfenlightened, half-salacious emphasis on the voracious Persian conqueror played by Eva Green, 300: Rise of an Empire hews closely to the look, vibe and the casualty count of its sleekly schlocky 2007 predecessor, helmed by Zack Snyder. Likewise taken from a Frank Miller graphic novel, the sequel chronicles mighty Grecian battles. This is the genre of abs and pecs and arrows in the eye in slow motion, with geysers of globby blood floating around, prettily and painlessly, for our gamer-style delectation.
Non-Stop (PG-13) ★★★✩✩
The frantic, occasionally funny animated feature Mr. Peabody & Sherman is a 3-D big-screen version of a fantastic early 1960s artifact. Director Rob Minkoff, who co-directed The Lion King, responded to the script’s sentimental streak. The rejiggered premise casts a cold light on the dog/boy relationship. Modern Family’s Ty Burrell voices Peabody; Max Charles is Sherman; first-rate supporting talents help out: Stephen Colbert, Leslie Mann, Patrick Warburton and Mel Brooks.
Liam Neeson is back headlining another entertainingly preposterous thriller. Non-Stop confines its action almost entirely to the inside of a trans-Atlantic New York-to-London flight. Federal air marshal Bill Marks (Neeson) is a nervous flier, an alcoholic ex-cop who looks as though he’s carrying around a suitcase of unresolved issues. His seatmate (the overqualified Julianne Moore) sees in Bill a man in need of some comfort and conversation. But this is a whodunit, or the present-tense variation on the whodunit, the who’sdoingit. The movie’s fun.
Son of God (PG-13) ★★★✩✩
The Wind Rises (PG-13) ★★★★✩
Blame Mel Gibson: No new Jesus movie is worth its salt without an unflinching treatment of his torture and Crucifixion. But Son of God, a big-screen version of Mark Burnett and Roma Downey’s History Channel series The Bible, has a redemptive optimism that makes the brutality go down easier. Like the criticized TV series it is culled from, the film aims to be inoffensive. With multiple directors and screenwriters, they manage that. Unlike Gibson’s bloody blockbuster, this loving, forgiving son comes back long enough to remind us why Christianity has endured.
This is being marketed as the “farewell masterpiece” of Japanese writer-director Hayao Miyazaki. The Wind Rises makes the dream of flight a vehicle for bittersweet enchantment. Most U.S. theaters will be presenting the English-dubbed edition featuring the voices of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski and Stanley Tucci. I hope The Wind Rises turns out to be one of those false farewells a major artist makes, before re-entering the creative arena. Either way, Miyazaki will have left behind a lifetime of handmade beauty.
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SEVEN QUESTIONS
from a hospitality standpoint, from a guest-experience standpoint, the experience will really be seamless. What’s the one element about SLS that will have frst-time guests buzzing? Philippe Starck’s design will set us apart quite a bit from the rest of the market. In line with his signature style, the design is imaginative and unexpected, with playful twists that complement Las Vegas. Then from a service standpoint, our hospitality and our culture is fun and inviting; it’s not as buttoned-up and as whitetablecloth, maybe, as some of the other stuff in the market. It’s trendy, hip, fun, cool, but still technically really, really well done in terms of the service. SBE as a company has been growing for 10 years. And it’s almost as if we’ve been growing toward this one moment. Who is the one chef who isn’t yet in the SLS Las Vegas family that you’d really like to bring aboard? There are so many great chefs whom I love. We’ve worked with Michael Mina in the past, and he’s such a pro, such a great guy. I’d really like to work with him again. Mario Batali is a really cool guy, someone I admire and respect. And then there are always a lot of up-and-comers. And I would say we have some people in our company now who haven’t quite had the chance to be the No. 1 [chef] and put their footprint on something, and they are really, really talented.
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The man in charge of the dining program at SLS Las Vegas on the importance of culture, his chef wish list and what to order him at the bar By Al Mancini
You’re the senior vice president of restaurants for SBE, the parent company that owns SLS Las Vegas. How’d you get into the hospitality business? I went to college just outside of Boston, then I moved to Boston and got a job at an investment bank, like every good college guy does. And I
realized quickly how much I couldn’t stand sitting behind a desk every day. I had worked at restaurants since I was young, and my girlfriend at the time was in the industry and said, ‘Hey, why don’t I get you a job in the industry and get out of this investment bank?’ So long, long story short, I got
SLS is slated to feature 20 restaurants, bars, lounges and nightclubs when it opens Labor Day weekend. But what will set it apart from the competition? We have several brands that are already proven in other markets that are very successful, whether it’s Katsuya throughout L.A., and the Bazaar with José Andrés in Beverly Hills and in South Beach. And it’s great to take proven brands and pop them all under one roof. The other big differentiator is the fact that every single employee under the roof of SLS Las Vegas is an employee of SBE. So from a culture standpoint,
When was your frst trip to Las Vegas, and what were your initial impressions? My best friend growing up got married to his high school sweetheart, and we stayed at the Rio 15 or 20 years ago. And I loved it. What’s the bar on the roof of Rio? Voodoo. We went up there. And just looking out over the Strip and checking out the other properties—the energy and the vibe and the colorfulness and all of it. Vegas is the one and only! If someone runs into you at one of the SLS bars and wants to buy you a shot, what should they order? Chilled Don Julio 1942.
PHOTO BY JON ESTRADA
March 27–April 2, 2014
Matt Erickson
a job bartending on Newbury Street in Boston at a place called Armani Café. I loved it so much that within a few months I moved up to management. And the rest is history.
By the time you open it’ll have been more than 3½ years since the last big hotel-casino project debuted on the Strip, the Cosmopolitan. How has the market changed since then? SBE has had our fnger really on the pulse of Los Angeles and South Beach, and for the last couple of years [we’ve been] really engaged here in Las Vegas. Some of the core things that we do—small plates, really social dining, maybe a little lower check averages in some places, giving the guest more of a value proposition—all of those things are kind of the way the market is going.