Jubilee

Last night Mary and I crossed another "Vegas experience" off the list -- the Jubilee topless revue that has been running 25 years now.

This was one of those "classic" Vegas showgirl numbers with--as the ads say--hundreds of thousands of rhinestones covering hardly anything.

It would be hard to overstate how utterly ridiculous this production was. How much time and money and thought went into something so ... bad. Admittedly, at the beginning there was a certain kitch factor. There were lots of scantily-clad dancers (the topless dancers were expected, but the men in thongs and cod pieces were a surprise to this theater-goer) parading around in funny hats.

(My favorite hat was about 3 feet in diameter and about 4 feet tall. It looked like they created the hat by cutting off 4 foot sections of Mr. Snuffleupagus' trunk, dying the sections either pink or yellow, and then attaching them to the poor head of a dancer who must have had 10 pounds of Muppet trunk on her head.)

With all that, the show started kind of fun but it quickly got boring and incredulously bad.

The second act was a "lesson in ancient history" when we revisited Samson and Delilah. It took awhile for what I was actually sinking but, but at some point when Samson is fawning over Delilah, I couldn't help but think, "Did the producers really think that staging a Bible story with topless dancers was a good idea?" They must have figured that out of the number of people who could tell you that Samson and Delilah is a Bible story, most of them wouldn't be at a topless revue to start with.

It went from weird to worse.

Act IV was their take on the sinking of the Titanic. The story ended, inexplicably, with a full chorus line doing high kicks and singing Yankee Doodle Dandy. Because that made a lot of sense. Fellas, it was a British ship!

Mary and I quickly scooted after that.

What a very odd theatrical experience. Next time I'm here, I'm going to skip the Vintage Vegas thing and just go to "O" at the Bellagio.