I can’t help but walk away from SHANGRI-LA-LA feeling as if I had just witnessed some kind of Bialystock and Bloom scheme. Book, Music, and Direction by Mike Meier, with an additional writing credit for Peter Giambalvo, SHANGRI-LA-LA bills itself as a musical comedy about the exorbitantly priced rise and tragic fall of performance duo Siegfried and Roy.
The words “Musical” and “Comedy” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. All art is subjective, but it couldn’t have been a good sign that I had spent much of the 1-hour “Abbreviated
Showcase” laughing at the production rather than with it.
It feels mean to talk about, like I’m kicking someone when they’re already down, but the problems literally begin at the jump when our narrator Ben “Bugsy” Siegel (Dean Davis) flubs
his entrance and asks to restart the opening number. The production grinds to a halt as our intrepid sound board operator needs to refire the cue, but all the ensemble members who had
walk-ons during the opening number are already mid-quick-change The show opens again with Davis standing around literally doing nothing for an intro sequence that was probably only a few seconds but very easily felt like it went on for a couple of years. This is functionally the mirror, mirror version of Van Halen’s Brown M&M test: an immediate, at-a-glance confirmation that we were in for a painful experience.
The production is also by no means a true biopic, Meier and Giambalvo are instead laser-focused on the duo’s 13-year stint at The Mirage. The book even takes the creative liberty of depicting Siegfried and Roy as naive, wide-eyed German immigrants when they first meet Steve Wynn and begin their Mirage residency in 1990, rather than veterans of the industry with nearly three decades of experience under their belt. The production rides the line between mundanely exploitative realities of Vegas showbiz, and the ostensibly supernatural elements of literally signing away your soul to the devil, but ultimately lacks any real narrative commitment beyond
simply recanting a history of the Vegas residency.
Between dull, repetitive numbers, the audience is given very little actual time to ingratiate themselves with The Masters of the Impossible. Siegfried and Roy perform exactly one (1) feat
of magic that is anything more than birthday clown garbage, but it’s sandwiched between lectures on Vegas historical trivia and musical numbers about sexual harassment for fun and
profit. For all the talk of Show-biz glitz and glamour, there’s a pervasive ‘cheapness’ undergirding everything. Some of it has a bit of a camp charm, such as when the whip crack “effect” is a lone percussionist doing foley work with their belt, but it all ends up feeling half-assed at the best of times. Dollar Store costumes, flaccid choreography, embarrassing dialogue, and muddled direction all leave the production switching back and forth between “So Bad It’s Good” and “So Bad It’s Bad”. There’s a moment where two audience plants are awkwardly brought on stage to stumble through a disappearing act (getting pushed clumsily into the wings), and I was silently begging to switch places with them.
There is one place where the production really goes all out on the budget, with a massive animatronic dragon’s head being unveiled to the audience in the patter to the number “OUT THE
CAULDRON”. It’s a very impressive set piece introduced very early on, with piercing red eyes and a range of motion on its neck. It would be more impressive if it did anything other than leer at the audience from the stage left catwalk, but there was something unintentionally, grimly symbolic about it, as if SHANGRI-LA-LA comes equipped with its own Doctor T. J. Eckleburg to brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
You know how the story ends: Roy gets mauled by Mantacore (Here depicted as an actor wearing a generic orange tiger-striped onesie rather than an iconic white tiger one, back to that
cheapness note but it’s whatever, moving on) forcing Wynn to end the residency. It hardly has time to serve as a satisfying narrative crescendo before it gets pushed along for even more banter and trivia, as the show then hard cuts 2 decades forward to put a bow on the duo’s lives. Roy Horn gets up from the couch to loudly exclaim “COVID killed me” before sitting back down to a few confused chuckles. “Cancer killed me” Siegfried Fischbacher declares in a similarly jarring manner. Sitting through SHANGRI-LA-LA killed me.
The Independent Artists movement 