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| - The Colosseum at Caesars is one of Vegas's few "classy" venues. Like formal night on a cruise ship, a night at the Colosseum is a chance for regular folks to dust off their most regrettable sequined gowns and rent-a-tuxes and promenade around like real-life city slickers. Local fools (and visiting idiots) consider the entertainment here to be high art, and it's all very serious and grown-up. Until now.
As I watched Shania Twain and the Country Bear Jamboree do-si-do around the stage, I swear I could feel Celine Dion wincing in horreur at the spectacle overtaking her precious proscenium. After all, they built that stage for HER -- and look at what these fly-by-night hillbillies are doing to it! All those boots scuffing the floor! A CAMPFIRE right in the middle! And it's just a matter of time before one of those horses takes a massive dump right on the hallowed spot where La Quebecoise bawls the Titanic theme night after night. Sacre Bleu!!!!!
For these reasons alone, I was very inclined to dig the SHIT out of this show. Alas, the entire production seemed a bit hokey, and very cruise ship. Boot-scootin', square-dancin', the aforementioned down-homey-ring-around-the-campfire shtick...not to mention the ABYSMALLY cheesy opening sequence, featuring a miserably executed green-screen fantasy of Shania riding bareback on a horse that somehow turns into a motorcycle, which then magically flies into the theater with a sequined Shania clinging to it for dear life. Uhh...REALLY?!
Shania herself looks fantastic, clothed in a succession of skin-tight, Be-Dazzled ensembles that would make Cowboy Barbie proud....topped off with an astonishingly voluminous weave that is so ginormous, it threatens to overtake the show. The higher the hair, the closer to Jesus! Her only other sartorial misstep is the lamentable pair of cheetah-print jammy pants she inexplicably flaps about in during "That Don't Impress Me Much." (I wouldn't be surprised if Celine herself didn't cattily advise her to wear them...can't have the competition looking TOO good.) But other than that, she looks marvelous.
The same sadly cannot be said for the rest of the show. The band is good, and the dancers are enthusiastically campy.... but many of the sets look like rejects from Frontierland (I TOLD you it was the Country Bear Jamboree), and the Western shtick is plied thicker than flies on...well, you know. First you're in the forest primeval, birds tweeting merrily... then it starts snowing...next thing you know you're in a honky-tonk, and then you're back in the forest, sitting around a giant campfire. YEE-HAW! The finale is an orgy of glitter, fireworks and square dancing, like the Vegas Express colliding with the Chattanooga Choo-Choo -- the finest lowbrow spectacle this side of Royal Caribbean.
Sadly, the people who come to Vegas (and the Colosseum) will likely lap up this pap like grits-n-gravy, so..... Kudos to you, Shania Twain; you are soon to be an even wealthier woman! But be careful with that money...one day, you'll buy a weave (or a BeDazzler) so big, it will destroy us all!!!!!!!!!
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