Harley Soltes
Showman Greg Thompson and his wife, Sunny, prepare for her new one-woman play, Marilyn: Forever Blonde.
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Were it not for Las Vegas, a performer like Clint Holmes, best known for playing Ed McMahon to Joan Rivers' Johnny Carson on late-night television, would likely be a footnote in the annals of entertainment history. But because of Vegas—particularly casino mega-operator Harrah's—the singing, wisecracking, family-friendly headliner has his name in lights and all over billboards around town.
In this arid, lawless metropolis, if you build it, they actually will come, so if someone wants to inflate Clint Holmes to superstar status, why bother arguing? There's a catch, though: Holmes isn't one to parade around his eponymous theater's stage clad only in a pair of ripped jeans, simulating reverse cowboy-style intercourse on a mechanical bull with a topless blond nymph as a country-rock track fills the room with lusty, dusty sound. Leave that to the cast of Bareback, Harrah's after-hours, adults-only young country revue that follows Holmes' standing gig on a near nightly basis (the production is dark every Thursday).
"Are you ready to get loud and rowdy tonight?" Bareback's feisty brunet female lead, Nellie Norris, asks a crowd of some 400 at the onset of the hour-long song-and-dance show, performed on a faux saloon set to a soundtrack by Toby Keith, Cowboy Troy, and the like.
Behind the bar at Club Bareback is a giant screen, where Peterbilt trucks whiz by as four singing cowpokes perform Big & Rich's "Comin' to Your City" and "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy." Minutes later, a sextet of female dancers scamper out, removing their tops during Gretchen Wilson's "Here for the Party" as the gender-balanced, mostly middle-aged crowd yelps and grins with titillated glee.
"You know how to please a man like me?" asks male lead Darryl Ross, the lone African American in the troupe. "All you've got to do is get naked."
A short distance from the Strip, in the Rio's circular, pulsating nightclub, Harrah's sister casino is playing host to a risqué headbanger's revue called Erocktica, which features the slogan "Sex, Sweat & Rock 'n Roll" and opens with porno flick credits playing on a large screen behind the venue's main stage. Unlike Bareback, where the dancers' teardrop breasts appear real, Erocktica looks to be about 100 percent silicone—sending its female lead, Gabriella Versace (not her real name), to the front of the stage with only a skin-colored thong separating her from bare essence before the production's lone male performer, Ray-J (aka Raymond Jones), breaks into a rendition of Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle."
Clad in an all-black ensemble that includes shades, a bandana, and a leather vest with the letters "XTREM" inscribed on the back, Ray-J sizes up a topless dancer named Sasha who bears an uncanny resemblance to Elizabeth Berkley, star of the critically slaughtered film Showgirls.
"Man, see how round that booty is?" says Ray-J to a mostly twentysomething crowd of 300 or so. "When you've got so much pretty ass in your face, it gets a little cloudy sometimes."
Exuding an energy that can best be described as Sammy Hagar meets Mark Wahlberg, Ray-J nails AC/DC's "Shook Me All Night Long" and Def Lepard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me" before yielding to Versace, who is joined by four backup dancers in a vamped-up version of "Lady Marmalade." As Versace, a former Miss Pennsylvania whose looks walk a fine line between hot and Hedwig, shifts into Tina Turner's "Private Dancer," some dubious accoutrements appear center stage.
"Can't have a rock and roll show without some stripper poles," boasts Ray-J, before joining Versace in a melodramatic version of "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Toward the end of the show, Ray-J takes a swig from a fifth of Jack Daniels, à la Van Halen's Michael Anthony, before explaining to his patrons why the bottle's base is square instead of round.
"It won't roll away when you pass out," he explains, before hammering home his hypermacho ethos. "Drink some Jack, smack some pretty ass—and they pay me to do this!"
Casting, choreography, set design: Thompson does everything at his
Seattle studio.
Specifically, Greg Thompson pays Ray-J to do this. One of the best-known showroom producers in all of Nevada, Thompson oversees every last detail of his productions before shipping truckloads of sets, costumes, and props to casinos, cruise ships, hotels, and nightclubs worldwide. But unlike its competitors, Greg Thompson Productions (GTP) is not based in Nevada—it's located on Seattle's Elliott Avenue West, in a trio of nondescript brown buildings north of downtown near the Myrtle Edwards granary.
"I'd have to think about whether or not any of the other producers aren't based here," says Mike Weatherford, who critiques casino-based shows for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "In this line of work, Seattle is kind of a strange place to be."
Yet Seattle is the only place Greg Thompson has ever hung his hat with any permanence. A Roosevelt High School and University of Washington grad, Thompson pondered a career as a journalist before deciding there was no money in it (correct, sir). So he decided to mount a career in showbiz, and quickly zeroed in on the middlebrow, retro niche of musical theater. Not long after discovering local starlet Julie Miller on a freelance talent hunt in Wenatchee in 1973, Thompson began producing shows of various shapes and sizes at the woebegone Jack McGovern Music Hall downtown, hiring a then-unknown 17-year-old named Kenny Gorelick (aka Kenny G) to be his musical director.
