Vegas Magazine - Niche Media - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.
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F or all of their communal artistry and shared experiences and success, Penn & Teller differ on the moments that made them fall for Las Vegas. For Penn Jillette, it was a quick side trip to Vegas he made with a group of friends in the late 1980s. The plan was to tour the Grand Canyon but, you know, Vegas was right there. "We came to Vegas just to make fun of it," Jillette says during a chat in the Monkey Room, the backstage enclave that serves as Penn & Teller's meet-and-greet room at the Rio. The walls are laden with stars the two have met during the course of their career, photos of them with such a wide array of celebrities as Liberace, Don Rickles, Madonna, David Letterman, and Bob Newhart. "We had on our leather jackets and our Ramones shirts. We went to see Dean Martin, in order to—not loudly or vocally—ridicule him. You know?" But 20 minutes into the show, Jillette found he was part of a sleight-of-attitude performance. "Dean Martin destroyed us. He just shut us up," Jillette says, practically shouting through the retelling and comparing the consistent pace and personality to his favorite band. "It was one of the best shows I had ever seen, and I thought it was identical to the Ramones in that they just talk faster and louder and in the same key and it becomes something beautiful. Dean Martin took this relaxed and not-giving-a-crap attitude and did a whole show with no ups or downs, and it was so fascinating to me. I was just blown away." Teller was similarly awed by a different sort of traditional Vegas performance: the Donn Arden showgirl spectacular Jubilee! at Bally's. "Penn and I were visiting Vegas with a band called The Residents, and we all decided to see a Vegas show," Teller says in a separate interview in the Monkey Room. "I remember one of the guys, who was from Louisiana and spoke in this deep, round, welcoming Southern tone, saying, 'What I love about that show is, you plunk down your admission price and you sit back and say, "Spend it!"' That's true to this day: You feel that Jubilee! is a generous show. Big and generous and absolutely unpretentious, and it comes out of a real tradition." Twenty years after debuting on the Strip—appropriately enough at Bally's, where Martin once starred and Jubilee! still does—Penn & Teller are themselves a Vegas institution. It is no mere coincidence that they possess the same sense of affable, aloof confidence that Martin brought to the stage, or that their show is among the city's more generous for its thoughtful and stylish staging. In January 1993 Penn & Teller found themselves headliners at the Celebrity Room at Bally's. Even though the duo had developed a heartfelt appreciation for the best-known Vegas shows, they were not at all confident that their offbeat comedy and magic show would be as well-received as, say, Dino or Frank Sinatra, who sold out Celebrity Room with an act that was (to put it mildly) nothing like their own. They had evolved from street performers in Philadelphia to the darlings of off-Broadway by the mid1980s, when such hip entertainment and pop-culture luminaries as Lorne Michaels, Paul Simon, and Andy Warhol turned up to watch them perform Penn & Teller at the 230-seat Westside Theatre. like Dana Carvey. They learned that being concerned about demographics, or the type of audience that would happen into a Penn & Teller audience in a place like Vegas, was not their concern. "There are people who have put a full-time salary's worth of thought into that process," Jillette says. "I said to Teller, 'It's not our job to figure out our audiences.'" They filled the 1,400-seat Celebrity Room on their opening night. This, without issuing a single free ticket to a VIP or invited guest, something even Sinatra hadn't managed. "That's how you beat Sinatra's record—by knowing no one in Vegas, and having no high rollers who want to see you," Teller says in his wickedly high-pitched laugh. The sold-out Bally's dates became regular dates at Hollywood Theatre at MGM Grand after the Celebrity Room closed, and in January 2001 they debuted at the Rio, where they are still the permanent headlining act in their own Penn & Teller Theater. Now 20 years after they first stepped onto a Vegas stage as headliners, they consistently draw 1,200 fans per show, five nights a week, one of Vegas's best-selling and consistently inspired performances. Their recent six-year extension made them recordbreakers as well, as the longestrunning headliners at one venue. Penn & Teller have become an institution principally by remaining unique. When they started, there was no other Vegas production quite like theirs, a blend of simple magic, forcefully opinionated oratory, and sharp comedy. "When we started here, people came to Vegas for two nights, and they would act in a way they didn't normally act," Jillette says. "They'd smoke cigars, chase women around, and go see shows that they knew would suck anyway. And it seemed like after two nights they were saying, 'You know, we might want to see something that's actually good.' That's what I believed changed. Acts started coming here that were actually good and inspired—Blue Man Group and even Cirque du Soleil—and these are all acts that are not seen ironically." The interpersonal chemistry via their aggressively dissimilar personalities is one reason Penn & Teller have managed a consistent mystique in the face of an ever-evolving Vegas entertainment culture. The unfailingly extroverted Jillette is the one who opts for national television, visiting The Celebrity Apprentice for a second time starting in "IT'S NOT OUR JOB TO FIGURE OUT OUR AUDIENCES." —PENN JILLETTE 70 The smart, sophisticated, and discriminate fans loved the show. So did reviewers for the The New Yorker and The New York Times, who kept writing what Teller describes as "love letters" about the show. But what about the average ticket-buyer? The duo's onstage sensibilities were put to the test in a late-1980s run at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, booked by the mysteriously confident Joel Fischman, who would later sign acts into Bally's in Vegas. The performers felt their lengthy monologues and such delicate acts as "Shadows," where Teller painstakingly snips away silhouetted roses on a white sheet as the real flowers fall to the floor, would fly over the heads of a casino crowd. "We said, 'Those Philistines? Really?'" Teller recalls. "We had the total supercilious, cocked eyebrow. 'Are you serious?'" But they filled the room during these performances, sharing the bill with such coheadliners as B.B. King, The Temptations, and even hot comics of the time VEGASMAGAZINE.COM 068-073_V_Feat_CoverStory_Win13.indd 70 1/2/13 3:03 PM