Deadmau5 To Be Featured In An EDM Theatrical Show in Las Vegas
An electronic dance music theatrical show that involves deadmau5 is currently being developed to go into Paris Las Vegas.
As a replacement to the award-winning musical ‘Jersey Boys,’ the show featuring deadmau5 will be produced by Base Entertainment. Currently Canadian investors are being pitched to bankroll the show.
There’s no word yet when Base Entertainment will stage the show, but a senior Caesar’s exec said “We hope to have a lot of announcements to make shortly.”
By adding EDM into a theatrical venue, Las Vegas businesses hope to regain the lost demographic due to the booming nightclub business.
The timing tracks. Jersey Boys wrapped its Vegas run at Paris Las Vegas on September 18, 2016, after eight and a half years on the Strip, leaving Caesars Entertainment with an empty theater and an audience that’s aged out of jukebox musicals. Pairing deadmau5’s brand with a residency-style theatrical production would’ve been a genuinely new format for Vegas, which has leaned almost entirely on nightclub residencies — think Hakkasan, XS, Omnia — rather than a full staged production built around one electronic artist.
It’s worth remembering deadmau5 wasn’t new to Vegas even then; he’d already been playing the Strip’s biggest clubs for years. But a theatrical production is a different animal entirely, closer to a Cirque du Soleil-style show than a DJ set, which is exactly what made this pitch stand out.
It wouldn’t have been the first time electronic music got the full Vegas production treatment, either — the Strip has flirted with everything from silent-disco concepts to elaborate light-and-sound spectacles over the years, but nothing built specifically around a single crossover DJ-producer at deadmau5’s level. Given how visual his live shows already are, complete with his signature Cube stage design and synced light rigs, a theatrical adaptation wasn’t as much of a stretch as it might sound on paper.
As of this writing, there’s no public record that this specific Base Entertainment production ever made it to opening night, and details on what became of the pitch are thin. deadmau5 stuck around Vegas anyway, going on to hold down residencies at spots like Zouk Nightclub and XS in the years since, so the Vegas connection never really went away even if this particular theatrical concept didn’t pan out the way it was first pitched.
H/T: Review Journal
