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 Bet on Bette Midler and the Audience Wins. She is a triple threat – sing, act, dance – while we are at it, include stand-up comedian, top concert draw, recording artist, and film star – she is the whole package. But time does eventually take its toll. The performer ends up standing in one spot while the dancers and other performers pick up the slack, right? Most emphatically – wrong! Bette and her alter ego, “the Divine Miss M” continues to amaze audiences with energy, comedic sense, and vocal passion at the age of 63. She covers the 100 plus foot stage at Caesars Palace’s Coliseum in Las Vegas five nights per week in The Showgirl Must Go On to repeated standing ovations. How does she do it? Will there be a new wave of ‘do it all performers’ or have we harvested all the low hanging fruit on the entertainment tree?
An agent, booking acts in the Midwestern part of the U.S., was heard to remark; “There isn’t any place for live performers to hone their performance skills anymore, there is no place to be bad, no more minor leagues. The hotel lounges and small nightclubs are few and far between. Expectations are so high for performers coming right out of the gate; but there is no place for them to develop, the only way you can, in front of a live audience.”
Bette Midler began in the bathhouses of NYC and eventually landed a role in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway. When we met her, in the early 70’s, she was a waitress at the Improv in NYC. When not running drinks to patrons, she went up on stage to sing or take her place in an improvised comedy skit. Al Jerreau, Marty Allen and Robert Klein were performing their songs and bits on the same night. Fast forward one year and we are sitting in an all night diner on Rush Street in Chicago after our gig at the Four Torches. We looked across aisle and saw Bette sitting alone in a booth. We said hi and referenced seeing her at the Improv, commenting that we felt she was going to be a huge star some day. She told us she had been performing at the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva Wisconsin, where our band had just performed weeks before. She had come into town to see her good friend, Marvin Braverman, do his comedy shtick at Mr. Kelley’s. We talked for a few minutes about the music business, and not more than a month later we saw her on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Wow! I guess you could say, “The rest is history.”
 Dan and I are really not “fan” types. He is a performer and has such a wide range of musical tastes that we have always enjoyed many styles of vocalists and musicians; but I must admit that through the years, we have managed to see every North American tour of the Divine Miss M:
1972 – The Divine Miss M Tour
1975 – Clams on the Half Shell
1976 – The Depression Tour
1981 – Divine Madness
1983 – De Tour
1999 – The Divine Miss Millenium Tour
2003 – Kiss My Brass Tour
And now we have the pleasure of watching her in our own back yard.
Shows in Las Vegas have become all about amazing effects and acrobatic agility that can take your breath away. Performers are over head, flying by as they twist and flip; stages rise up to become vertical walls covered in gymnasts floating in front of the audience at warp speed and all this is received with luke-warm applause. Why? There is really no emotional connection with the people in the seats. These shows are played “at” the audience not “to” the audience. They are designed to entertain international audiences so they do not need to understand English in order to enjoy the show.
At UNLV we offer a degree in Entertainment Engineering because this is the not only the present, but the wave of the future—the blend of engineering, architecture and entertainment. Art becomes a huge platform of innovative hydraulic staging. Obviously there is a lot to be gained having 6 or 7 Cirque shows in one town at any given time; but what is being lost in the process?
There is a lot to be said for, a band, a spotlight and a performer. Soon, the only place to see performers do their thing live will be in an eighteen to twenty thousand seat arena in LA, NYC, Chicago, or another city large enough to provide a theater – not an arena – a theater with 600 to 1200 seats and an unobstructed view. Once common, these venues are rapidly vanishing or do not hold enough patrons to make them interesting to promoters.
We teach a concept to students in our entertainment classes at UNLV: “You always use the right tool for the job.” For example, you don’t wear a headset microphone just because it looks cool. You wear it because you need the freedom to move around the stage and you need to step away from a stationary microphone stand in order to accomplish your entertainment goal. We also teach our students that sometimes the most effective production you can utilize on a stage is a single performer, a stool, a hand held microphone and a single spotlight. Nowhere is this more evident than when Bette Midler pays homage to John Prine by performing Hello in There, a song which has always been included in her show. The stage has a scrim, a hand-held microphone and a spotlight. The rest is all up to Bette. She must single handedly communicate with each and every member of the audience and relate to them without one hydraulic lift or acrobatic flip!
In our Media in Entertainment class, we require our students to attend a live performance and write a review. It can be any type of performance as long as it is live. Below please find an excerpt from one of the students in the class. One of the questions for the assignment is: Did the live performance change your personal belief about something or your impressions of the artist in any way?
“My husband took me to see Bette Midler as he knows I adore her. We saw her perform at Caesars Palace in the beautiful Coliseum. She's already had a tremendous impact on me as a performer over the years just by watching her perform. Seeing how she puts every single ounce of her heart and soul into all that she does, and it shows. I was reminded watching her and thinking that age is a state of mind. She's in her 60’s in physical years, and can still move and sing like she does. It's because she believes she can still do it, so she can. It didn't change the way I believed about something, but it completely reinforced in me the way I already believe, that in order to fully be realized as an artist you have to do like Bette does and give it everything you've got and wrap it up with love and people will feel the truth in it.” --JC 06/22/09
Dan and I often wonder if this cabaret style of entertainment—this pure connection with the audience is becoming a lost art. We have been watching it slip away in Vegas over the past twenty years as lounges have been replaced by slot machines, as engineered entertainment circuses have replaced “name” entertainers.
At least, for now, we feel fortunate to have an entertainer that reminds us that a personal connection between a single artist and an audience can be the best show in town.
Photos: Kathy and Dan Nelson
Click here for this issue's
Industry News: Book 'Em: Advice for Successful Live Music, by Jenny Adams
Click here for this issue's
featured artist: Alain Nu and "Invisible Connections"
 Mark
Sonder, CSEP is the Chief Entertainment Officer of Mark Sonder
Productions, an award-winning entertainment producer, Mark Sonder Productions, Inc. is the national leader in designing event marketing solutions through headline entertainment and production services for facilities, corporations and associations, since 1985.
In addition, Sonder sits on
the faculty of the University
of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV), The George Washington University, Stratford
University, and Northern Virginia Community College.
Event
Entertainment and Production is the book published by
Wiley authored by Sonder.
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