Lights, audience, profit: The evolution of the Las Vegas spectacle

Las Vegas is known as a post-modern city; its development in the later half of the twenty-first century is an explosion of tourism, spectacle and gambling. Especially with the transitions of the past two years and the great variety in the new shows, no one has asked the question how did Las Vegas get from the showgirl to Blue Man Group? If we are to visualize a Las Vegas in the future, it is essential that we understand the whys of and the forces that impel change in the Las Vegas entertainment industry; As there are no chronologies of the Las Vegas spectacle this paper is an effort to delineate the evolution of the spectacle as a beginning step to understanding the forces that change Las Vegas. What follows is a piecing together of myths, opinions, visual accounts, personal memories, and some documented chronologies of the development of the current shows in Las Vegas.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Theatre

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Year

2002

Author dc:creator

• Koran, Jaime Lee Rana

Contributors dc:contributor

• Ellis Pryce-Jones

Statement dc:rights

• IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

https://oasis.library.unlv.edu/rtds/1372

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:oasis.library.unlv.edu:rtds-2371