VIVA LAS VEGAS!

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No wonder the local Kublai Khans are planning more. Treasure Island's Steve Wynn, who also owns the tony Mirage, is ready to break more banks with his new Beau Rivage resort next year. The Grand's Kirk Kerkorian, when he's not plotting his takeover of Chrysler, looks at plans for his new hostelry, New York-New York, whose facade will be in the shape of the Manhattan skyline. Even the Walt Disney Co. is rumored to be looking at Las Vegas property-though Disney chairman Michael Eisner denies any interest in bringing Disney to Vegas.

Well, Vegas has already done that for Eisner. The town is Disneyfied in two important ways. One is that its shows have the Good-Lord-what-next? suspense of a Disney World thrill ride. Or as Tom Bruny, the MGM Grand's director of advertising, explains the challenge of creating EFX: "We knew we had to produce a 'gee whiz' show, but we didn't want it to be just a 'gee whiz' show."

Vegas follows another Disney dictum: it sets out to create entertainment the whole world will pay to see. The aim is pure show-and-tell: it shows with grand images and lavish costumes; it tells with familiar songs. A cuddly optimism replaces the mordant philosophizing of Tony Award-winning shows. People don't go to Vegas for a Sondheim musical (indeed, not many go to Broadway for one). Vegas shows are zippy, out-of-mind experiences aimed at vacationers of all classes and countries. "You have to have a certain style of show here," says EFX! master Crawford. "When half your audience doesn't speak English, you have to be very visual."

Vegas is constrained by tradition as well as by language. Just as most Broadway musicals look for their material in only a few places (old movies and old songbooks), so the crafters of Vegas extravaganzas find their inspiration in venerable forms of entertainment. The shows may stress magic or music or circus acts or ladies of the chorus, but all are essentially revues. Think of a zillionaire's R-rated TV variety hour: The Ed Sullivan Show with bosoms. And for the sound track, turn on an encyclopedic oldies station that goes from Gershwin to Grease.

Spellbound--with the generically suave illusionism of Mark Kalin and Jinger Leigh--also features an impressive trio of slow-motion acrobats called Human Design. The Tropicana's Folies-Bergere revue, freshened regularly since 1959, has a nicely erotic trapeze duo, the Cavarettas, a merger of Ringling Bros. with TV's Red Shoe Diaries.

Enter the Night, at the Stardust, has a harder edge--the men sing like Michael Bolton and dress like Fabio--but behind the crass is class: Cindy Landry and Burt Lancon, who were pairs silver medalists in the 1994 U.S. Open figure-skating championships, reimagine the Cavarettas' routine on a tiny ice rink. The best variety package is still Jubilee!, now in its 14th year at Bally's. Its huge, handsome sets and gargantuan production numbers (Samson and Delilah, the Sinking of the Titanic, a World War I dogfight)--with a few bites of chaste cheesecake--would make Flo Ziegfeld cheer.

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