Image details: Bette Midler’s Opening Night At The Colosseum At Caesars Palace served by picapp.com

Bette Midler kicked off her two-year run last night with the first of (at least) 200 shows at the Caesars Palace Colosseum.

“The Showgirl Must Go On” features mermaids in wheelchairs (seriously!), Midler’s well-known cheeky humor, and performances of some of her classics like “The Rose,” “From A Distance” and “Wind Beneath My Wings,” as well as an unexpected cover of John Prine’s “Hello In There.”

When Midler reinvented cabaret for rock audiences in the early 1970s, it seemed as though her 1976 stint at Caesars Palace would be the first of many. Instead it was Barry Manilow, her one-time musical director, who embraced Las Vegas while Midler stuck to concert tours and a movie career.

The singer filmed her 1997 HBO special “Diva Las Vegas” at the MGM Grand, and returned to ring in 2000 with a New Year’s show at the Mandalay Bay Events Center. She began talking to AEG Live, the producers who operate the Colosseum, after her “Kiss My Brass” tour wound down in Australia in 2005.

“I wanted to see what it was like to have a show you didn’t have to pack up and move, whether it be a prettier show or a more extravagant show,” Midler said last spring.

Last night’s first show included several celebrities in the audience, including Lance Bass, Joey Fatone, Alan Thicke, Lionel Ritchie, Taye Diggs, Jennifer Coolidge, Angela Bassett and husband Courtney B. Vance, Kathy Najimy and Ricki Lake, as well as other Las Vegas-based performers Siegfried & Roy, George Wallace, Gladys Knight, Rita Rudner and Toni Braxton.

[LVRJ]

The Colosseum at Caesars Palace
3570 Las Vegas Blvd South
1-877-723-8836

Post from: The Las Vegas Adventurer