by Dave Hickey
LOST BOYS
This was 1960. They were working as stewards on the Bremen as it ploughed its way back and forth across the North Atlantic between Bremerhaven and New York. The blond one, who was a farm boy from Bavaria, had a night gig doing magic tricks for passengers in the lounge. He pulled rabbits out of hats, did card tricks, ate razor blades—the usual. The dark one just sulked. The ship owners had forced him to abandon his pet cheetah at the dock, to leave it behind with friends in the Fatherland, and for most of their first crossing, he brooded darkly on the injustice of it all. (He was the fourth son of a staid banking family, a certified black sheep, and a bit of a brat, as well.)
Then, one afternoon, while the two friends huddled in the rain on the afterdeck of the Bremen, watching the wake disappear into the green mist, the dark one asked his Bavarian friend if it was possible to do magic with a cheetah. His friend replied rather solemnly that, in magic, anything was possible. When he was a child, he said, he had learned magic tricks from a little paper pamphlet he purchased at the candy store in their village. When he performed these tricks at home, in the kitchen of their farmhouse, they had elicited smiles from his father. If magic could do this, he explained, magic could do anything. So, on their next crossing, the dark one, Roy, had his cheetah, and the blond one, Siegfried, had a partner in his magic act.
In the beginning, they divided responsibilities they later would share. Siegfried would manage the illusions, and Roy would manage the cats. Between them, they had it knocked. The spectacle of social appearances and the domain of wild nature were theirs to command—theirs to manipulate as they wished, out on the high seas, like pirates, cut free from the past and everything it signified. “I can tell you this,” Siegfried says today, “when I disappear from the lounge of that ship in the middle of the ocean, and reappear as a cheetah, this is better than pulling rabbits out of a hat. Yes! Me and Roy, we are on our way. It is better than anything.”
The most recent product of their partnership is even better than that. Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage is the hottest ticket in Las Vegas and as good as it gets (whatever “it” might be). Created by the two illusionists in collaboration with production designer John Napier (Cats, Starlight Express) and writer-director John Caird of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the show is at once a seamless spectacle and a plausible, subversive conflation of Wagner, Barnum, Houdini, Rousseau, Pink Floyd, Fantasia, Peter Pan, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This may sound strange, but it would make perfect sense, if you had spoken with the artists, as I did for a pop magazine, at their white-walled compound in West Las Vegas, amidst their collection of lions and leopards, white tigers and black panthers. Art and life? Quelle différence?
We sat at a long designer table with a thick glass top, just off a shadowy, cavernous grand salon scattered with oriental rugs, filled with leather furniture, and hung with paintings of wild animals (some of them splendid, original products of the Victorian Renaissance, others fucking awful). We sat beside a long window-wall that looked out on the interior of their Mission-Moroccan compound. There, in dappled sunlight, snow-white tigers drifted like smoke across the perfect green lawn, cruising among white plaster effigies of themselves beneath swooping coconut palms, which were themselves echoed, here and there, by swooping, white aluminum versions of themselves, whited-out palms, like tropical ghosts. The backdrop for this scene was a long, white, tiger grotto full of bright, blue water with two fountains bubbling and a substantial waterfall that was controlled by a rheostat, located on the wall. (“Watch!” Roy says, as he turns the dial, “I stop the flood!”)
The “boys”—as everybody in Las Vegas calls them, although they are now in their early fifties—exude the same elusive blend of fact and fiction. Siegfried, the blonde one, is the more diffident, the steady one. In postwar Hollywood, his air of ironic, damaged innocence would have gotten him cast as a sympathetic U-boat commander. Roy, on the other hand, with his Eurasian cheekbones and fop-rock hairdo, is more exotic—the glamour puss of the team—a perpetual font of effervescent Germano-Vegas hyperbole. They are “showbiz” to their toes, in other words, but I couldn’t help liking them, nor avoid feeling about them (as Fred Allen did about Hollywood) that beneath all that phony tinsel, there is real tinsel.
They were so quirky, so passionate and articulate about their artistic intentions that it soon became clear that their new show was, in their eyes at least, something more than a commercial fabrication—and clear, as well, that for all their phony, glamour-mongering showmanship, Siegfried, at least (as would befit a wizard named Siegfried), had given considerable thought to what this phoniness, this glamour, and that showmanship might signify. “In this show,” he told me seriously, confidentially, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, “we have changed the frame around this dream, tried to put more in it, so now we hope people see not just the tricks, but what it means . . . to us, of course, to Roy and me, but also to them.” The question of what this magic means, however, is hard to talk about without talking first about whatever the hell Las Vegas might mean, because, for twenty-five years, Siegfried and Roy have been its official, rococo “outsider artists”—its crazy children—as much a part of its Zeitgeist as the neon and the crap tables.
So try to think of Vegas this way: as America’s Saturnalia, as the nonstop, year-round, 24-hour, American equivalent of that ancient Roman festival during which slaves took the roles of masters, only better and more glorious than that, since American slaves are less deeply afflicted by puritan values than their current masters—so American slaves in the role of Mediterranean masters, perhaps. Or just think of it as our province of stupid dreams, but stupid dreams that all too often tell true stories. Because desire (as Ferenczi was always reminding Freud) is a way of telling the truth, not knowing it—and Vegas tells the truth in ways that violate the canons and conventions of our culture's high and low with equal impunity.
Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage, Splash, Kenny Kerr’s Boylesque and Nudes on Ice are all as alien to The Jeffersons as they are to Jasper Johns—at once brighter and darker, cleaner and cooler, dirtier and more dangerous than either. Because, if high culture appeals to us as “extraordinary individuals,” and low culture appeals to us as “average citizens,” Vegas appeals to us as “common criminals”—as slaves in the role of masters—offering us respite from both the average and the extraordinary. In Las Vegas, we are all small-time troublemakers, closet wiseguys, delighted to let cabin boys, in the role of sorcerers, theatricalize our gaudy, subterranean “otherness” by regaling us with pleasures that are less requited, less sincere, and less hypocritical than those available in the culture at large—pleasures more redemptive of our protean, unbelieving, secret selves.
As a consequence, I never sit down to write something “serious” about The Strip without feeling, vaguely, like a Brazilian developer standing at the edge of a rain forest, flicking his Bic. Because there is something worth saving here, something critical to the eco-systems of the republic. Because people revel here who suffer at home—are free here who would otherwise languish in bondage. Bean-counters bet their kids’ education on a role of the dice. Kindergarten teachers gaze steely-eyed over the top of their cards, call your raise, and raise again. This is their secret place. From their hotel window, it stretches out into the night like a neon garden, supine in its worldly innocence—the pure virus of American culture denatured, literally, in the petri dish of the desert—virgin territory. Here, in the heart of the drift, is the last refuge of unsanctioned risk and spectacle—the wellspring of our indigenous visual culture—the confluence of all the hustle and the muscle—and I am going to gentrify its loveliest product with commentary (our favorite way of lying to ourselves), because that is what I do to afford living here. Las Vegans understand that kind of compromise. Contingency is all.
To proceed with my task, then, I should begin by noting that Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage is better than it has to be, by a wide margin. It does the heart’s work, ch
anges our perception of everything like it, and bears a subversive subtext that is as transparent or opaque as you wish it to be. The show itself, in its increments, is a 144-minute series of technical effects, metamorphic illusions, atmospheric tableaux, and musical production numbers with a chorus of about thirty. It moves with the logic of a large-venue rock concert from confrontation to complicity to community, establishing its authority with a thunderous operatic opening, then relaxing into a more intimate and participatory atmosphere, then rising again through a sequence of benign but increasingly extravagant effects that elevate both the act and the audience toward a sense of resolution.
The spectacle opens on a fog-shrouded Wagnerian battlefield, shot through with lights and lasers. Here, for the first forty minutes of the show (its longest uninterrupted sequence), the two illusionists do battle with a squad of Druidic priests, their biomorphic minions, and a splendid mechanical dragon. The metaphor is one of conflict, and the illusions are those of peril and rescue. Siegfried is fed to the dragon and emerges unscathed; Roy is impaled by the dragon and resurrected by Siegfried; both Siegfried and Roy are apparently crushed in the dragon’s claws only to reappear, swinging triumphantly out over the audience on ropes, à la Peter Pan. These are all rituals of friendship, and during one telling sequence, they take on more complex overtones, as Siegfried transforms a voluptuous, six-foot Valkyrie into Roy, then transforms Roy into an eagle, and then, soon afterwards, transforms himself into Roy. At this point, anyone used to reading theatrical metaphors is going to start suspecting there is an agenda in place.
Following this long confrontational opening sequence, the focus narrows and the lights brighten. The two illusionists dispense with mythic reality for a sequence of straight “magic tricks” with the requisite Chinese boxes, swords, saws, and showgirls in bondage—a “golden oldies” shtick borrowed from rock-and-roll. The sense of sexual mania built into this traditional repertoire, however, is subverted by the camped-up tempo at which these illusions are performed.
Having shifted from mythic wizards to traditional magicians, Siegfried and Roy then further reify themselves as regular guys, stepping out of their roles to converse with the audience. They invite a spectator onto the stage, introduce their animals, and even show some home movies of Roy cavorting with a white tiger in the blue-water grotto. This informal interlude is the magician’s equivalent of the acoustic segment in a rock concert. It’s also the corniest part of the show, but intentionally so, I suspect, since some bond of intimacy needs to be established with the audience in order to carry it along through an increasingly redemptive sequence of illusions toward the Arcadian conclusion of the show.
These final illusions speak the language of resurrection, reconciliation, and ascent. An elephant rises from the floor of the stage on a circular platform apparently supported by several members of the chorus. A drape is flung over the elephant. It collapses. The elephant has vanished, and the chorus immediately breaks into fervent song—a gospel entreaty to “Oooh, bring him back. Bring the elephant back!” There is another flash, and their prayer is answered. The elephant has reappeared to much rejoicing, and here, as elsewhere in the show, the actual effect of vanishing and reforming an elephant is subordinated to the dramatic subtext of death and resurrection that underpins the kind of illusion it is.
The same holds true in the penultimate scene of the show. Here, death and resurrection are upstaged by ascension. A spinning mirror ball, bombarded by lasers, floats down to hover about a foot off the floor. A snow-white tiger leaps out of it, then leaps back up and crouches on top of the ball. Roy then leaps onto the tiger and all three—man, tiger, and ball—go floating off, up into the laser-dazzled darkness while Michael Jackson sings the “Siegfried and Roy Theme.” It’s a magnificently goofy image—man astride the ghostly animal atop the spangled globe—somewhere between William Blake and The Little Prince. It provides the overture to the final tableau: Siegfried and Roy triumphant in a metallic-blue landscape populated with snow-white tigers. Home at last.
This completes the rhetorical dynamic of the show, its movement from confrontation to invitation to apotheosis. The actual, thematic content of the illusions themselves, however, is a little trickier and not quite so conventional, so I was casting about for some genre equivalent. I finally found it in Nina Auerbach’s analysis of Victorian pantomime, whose metamorphic abundance, she argues, constitutes “the seductive essence of Victorian theatricality.” In her book Private Theatricals, Auerbach discusses the growing disfavor into which these pantomimes fell in the late nineteenth century, attributing this disfavor to the burgeoning Victorian ideal of “sincerity”—to the ongoing dialectic between “sincerity” and “theatricality” in that period. Rather brilliantly, I think, Auerbach pegs this dialectic as a false one, pointing out that “sincerity” itself is a theatrical trope—”simple honesty” made brazenly and earnestly public.
The real issue in this debate, Auerbach suggests, was not the opposition of “sincerity” and “theatricality” but the opposition of the theatrically autonomous self (the “sincere” self) and the theatrically protean self (the “metamorphic” self) that is intrinsic to pantomime. Auerbach argues that these pantomimes challenged Victorian proprieties by creating “a world where gender was malleable, where history mutated with no transition into myth, where human pageants gave way to a fantasy of animals, . . . [where] dreams of bliss were indistinguishable from the horror of nightmares.” And this, of course, is exactly the imaginative reality of Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage—an extended pantomime with music, during which the barriers that distinguish identity, gender, and species dissolve at a gesture.
It is hardly surprisingly, then, that the dynamics of Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage would evoke other late Victorian celebrations of metamorphic theatricality: works like Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book—and earlier predecessors like The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Further, in much the same manner as their precursors, Siegfried and Roy have deployed the interchangeable polarities of Auerbach’s description (the “dreams of bliss” and the “horror of nightmares”) at the end-points of their spectacle, so the narrative flows from the nightmare of Armageddon to the dream of a Peaceable Kingdom. The content of every illusion, however, tells us that these transformations go both ways: Ends and beginnings are interchangeable in a protean universe.
Very little of the show’s content would change, in fact, if the spectacle were played backwards. Only the rhetorical effect, the meta-statement, would change, and this change would almost certainly gentrify the entire affair. That is, if the show began with the Peaceable Kingdom and ended with Armageddon, with no other changes, the whole production would find itself perfectly in tune with our continuing German-Victorian preference for narratives of tragedy and historical fate over narratives of comedy and redemption. (We continue to privilege these narratives, I suspect, because their valorization of “tragedy” and their capitulation to “history” tends to justify our not doing much beyond “analyzing” these ineluctable forces.) In any case, by playing their show backwards, Siegfried and Roy could book it into the Brooklyn Academy of Music—where its subtexts would be no less subversive.
Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage, however, is best appreciated in its innocence, the way it is and where it is—as the brightest facet of the American Saturnalia. Because, just as the Roman Saturnalia was an Imperial acknowledgment of Rome’s Republican past, the Saturnalia of Vegas and the redemptive rituals of Siegfried and Roy recall a less class-ridden sense of American possibilities. In its own context, and on its own terms, Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage demonstrates the way cultural entertainment may redeem itself without the gentrification of context or the arbitration of elite standards. It presents us with one of those rare occasions when the frenetic ingratiation of the audience (that more or less defines “pure” entertainment) issues a sublime permission, encouraging us to embrace our own theatricality, instability, insincerity, and excess.
In doing so, “the boys” transform the business of being entertained into a ritual of possibilities—a celebration of the perpetually reconstituted self. In a more innocent way, they ask Dorian Gray’s question. “Is insincerity such a terrible thing?” And give us Dorian’s answer, “I think not. It is merely a method by which we multiply our personalities.”
THIS MORTAL MAGIC
It's not so much what we do, or even what happens, it's the way things overlap and intersect: I was sitting at the desk in my office, in my apartment in Las Vegas, reading John Shearman's observations on the historical circumstances of Renaissance portraiture. Shearman had begun by positioning these portraits within the lives of their sitters, sketching in their lives before and after the paintings were made. Now he was suggesting, on this evidence, that the technical obsession with capturing the palpable vivacity of the sitter in Renaissance portraiture was very likely due to the fragility of life in that period, to the poverty of communications in Italy, and to the mobility of the class of people who had their portraits made—arguing that the portrait, where it hung, functioned less as a picture or a document than as an icon of the sitter's actual presence in the space when she or he was absent due to death or duty. Thus the passionate vivacity of these pictures. The sitter was supposed to be there.