Friday Night Laughs series, Straight No Chaser, 'Best of Broadway' among the varied choices
Straight No Chaser.
Atlantic City will still depend on major headliners in the summer months with recent announcements including Diddy with Dirty Money, the Monkees 45th Anniversary Tour, Paul Simon, New Kids on the Block with the Backstreet Boys, Weezer, Jim Gaffigan and Usher with Akon.
However, returning to a tradition that kept the town humming with entertainment all year ’round is the resurgence of the musical revue, plus a summer comedy series and the return of the popular a capella group Straight No Chaser.
A couple of “Follies” got the ball rolling with the Hilton featuring its show Boardwalk Follies and Resorts countering with its Roaring Twenties revue Moonshine Follies.
Now the Tropicana has announced that it is bringing back a popular revue it presented in 2008, Best of Broadway. The same Canadian producer that is currently doing the excellent Moonshine Follies, Mario Bazinet, is also the producer for this show, which is scheduled to run at the Trop from May 22 to June 29.
Over at Harrah’s, the casino is bringing back the terrific a capella group Straight No Chaser from June 21-Sept. 4. Obviously, their gig last summer called for an encore this year. The success of the TV series Glee is no doubt helping to sustain the popularity of this group, along with their undeniable talent.
While regular comedy headliners have been a mainstay of Atlantic City showrooms and the town’s two comedy clubs, The Comedy Stop at Tropicana and the Borgata Comedy Club, Harrah’s has decided to join the laugh fest with a spring-summer series called Friday Night Laughs. The weekly series kicks off April 15 with Dom Irrera. Other comics slated for the series include Jimmy Shubert, Richard Lewis and Eleanor Kerrigan.
Having musical entertainment available for non-weekend visitors to Atlantic City this summer should help Atlantic City battle the crippling recession that has hurt the town’s bottom line.
In a recent phone interview with All-American Rejects guitarist Mike Kennerty, he addresses the Rejects’ fans, the new album — released March 27 on Interscope — and the tour, which will be making a stop in Atlantic City at the Borgata on Friday, April 13.
“We knew it was going to be a bit different than what we experienced in Britain,” Turner says. “It’s much bigger [in the U.S.]”
This month marks 15 years for comedian Richard Lewis (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Drunks) being sober. Lewis is funny as ever and busy as ever too. Along with a bunch of other coals in the fire, the Brooklyn-born comic will appear at the Hilton in Atlantic City on Saturday, Aug. 29, with Curb co-star Susie Essman co-headlining.
The anticipation began with the Moonshine Follies billboard that showed off a leggy dancer’s lovely derriere. Now that the musical revue has officially arrived at Resorts, we can report that the athleticism of the dancers was not exaggerated, with costumes that accentuate the fine figures on display.
Boardwalk Follies, the new musical revue at the Hilton, opens with a nod to the hot decade in Atlantic City these days, the 1920s, with a traditional Boardwalk rolling chair and a song that harkens all the way back to 1914, “By the Beautiful Sea.”
Straight No Chaser, the 10-man a cappella group in residence at Harrah’s Resort through Aug. 28, isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel with its intricate vocal interpretations of popular songs from the past half-century. What the ensemble is doing, however, is taking unaccompanied singing out of the novelty category and giving it legitimacy as a mainstream type of entertainment. They accomplish this by straying from the familiar and well-worn a cappella path and blazing new trails by performing covers of songs one would never associate with this type of singing. Although they open the 75-minute show with a piece of original, self-introductory music, they quickly slide into songs that have...
Thirty years ago this weekend, Atlantic City's first casino opened. So did the first casino production show. Over the past three decades, revues have become ubiquitous forms of entertainment. Origin...
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