Instrumental in the development of the Las Vegas Strip, a look at the legacy The Mirage will leave.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Recognized as the first mega resort on the Las Vegas Strip, it's been 34 years since The Mirage opened its doors.

And on July 17 is when Hard Rock International will close them for good.

The Seminole Tribe of Florida owns Hard Rock International, which plans to renovate the property and reopen it as Hard Rock Las Vegas in a three-year time frame.

Following the Tropicana in April, this will be the second time this year a Strip casino is closing.

The Mirage, credited with helping create the Las Vegas Strip we see today.

And here to explain its tremendous influence is Howard Stutz, Gaming and Tourism Reporter for The Nevada Independent; John Katsilometes, Columnist at the Las Vegas Review-Journal; and Josh Swissman, Founding Partner and Managing Director of GMA Consulting.

Thank you all for joining Nevada Week.

Howard, I want to start with you.

You were there at the grand opening of The Mirage in 1989.

What was the Strip like at that moment, and what did people think initially of The Mirage?

(Howard Stutz) That was a long time ago.

No, it was fascinating because this was the first all-new resort in 15 years on the Strip.

And at the time, Strip resorts were basically, you put up slot machines, a buffet, table games, and, you know, maybe some other low-cost stuff, and just get people in.

That's all it was.

It was gambling joints.

Mirage, they gave away-- it was fascinating that they built an atrium with all these tropical trees and a rainforest.

And Steve, they said-- they looked at him like, Well, where's the slot machines?

How you gonna make money on this place?

So it was-- and the interest in it was worldwide.

It wasn't just, you know, just in Vegas and nationally.

It was worldwide interest.

-Why was that?

-Because it was-- I think it was just something so different for Las Vegas.

Plus it was 15 years, had been 15 years since we seen a new Strip resort.

That morning, there were, if you're familiar with the horseshoe driveway entrance, lines of people out the driveway all the way down onto the Strip on both entrances waiting to come in at noon when they opened it.

And it was just-- and it was like that the entire weekend and for weeks on end.

It was just the place that people wanted to see it after, you know, a couple years of development and building it.

So that's what it really-- it really did kick off what we see now today, as you said at the opening of what Las Vegas is today.

-Yeah, it's been described as revolutionary, iconic, transformational.

In what way, Josh?

(Josh Swissman) Well, I mean, just financially, in the first place, it was a bold move.

That resort had to make, to be able to service the debt and eke out a little bit of profit, he had to generate a million dollars in revenue a day, which at that point in time was unheard of and some people thought was crazy.

Clearly, you know, being the visionary that Steve Wynn was, he was able to see the potential there and generated well in excess of the million dollars a day.

So I think that, in terms of overall asset performance and property performance, was bold and industry leading, not only for Las Vegas, for the industry at large.

But the notion of introducing fine dining, the notion of introducing entertainment, the notion of simply introducing luxury into the gaming space was something that really hadn't happened, and certainly not at the scale that Steve Wynn programed that property to represent.

So I think in all of those ways, you saw something that was truly a revolutionary product on the Strip and beyond.

-Howard, you have a specific quote from Steve Wynn in your most recent reporting.

-That was in 2009 on the 20th anniversary.

I interviewed Steve for the Review-Journal when I did a story about the 20-year anniversary, and I asked him about the million dollars a day, and his comment was, "For all the people who thought we'd fall on our ass, I forgive them."

He said-- he said they made 1.1 million a day or more in just gaming revenue.

He said people forgot about the noncasino revenues, as you just pointed out, Josh.

It was like $800,000 a day they were making because of the restaurants and the show.

Siegfried and Roy's show was, you know-- I forgot what he paid to bring them over from The Frontier.

-A lot of the photos we got of the grand opening of The Mirage were of Siegfried and Roy with Steve Wynn.

Kats, will you explain their influence on this property, their influence worldwide.

(John Katsilometes) Well, this is the time when grandiosity came into the Las Vegas residency headliner community.

They were, they were superstars that were created originally as a side act and brought-- and evolved that way.

There's no-- right now, there's no path to have another Siegfried & Roy in the way that they were stars at The Mirage.

They, you know, they gained the attention of international visitors.

And by the time they came back, those people could see them at The Frontier.

The Frontier show led to their booking at The Mirage.

And what we saw was that we were seeing magic and a production show in Las Vegas staged in a way, in a scale that we'd never seen before.

We had exotic animals.

We had the white tigers.

We had elephants in the show.

We had costumes that were just as ostentatious as you could imagine.

And Siegfried & Roy became a brand of Las Vegas through this entire experience.

They sold every ticket to every show for 13 years.

No Show does this.

No Show does this today.

They don't sell every ticket to every show anymore.

Even "O" doesn't do this, doesn't sell every ticket.

They went on tour in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, two jets full of equipment and animals and cast members, built facilities in both cities, went to Radio City Music Hall and did a run there, set records at that venue, then opened at The Mirage.

So by the time they started at The Mirage, they were really well known.

You don't have to speak English to enjoy Siegfried & Roy.

The family can enjoy them.

When Letterman came out, I remember seeing them on the Letterman show for a week from Bally's.

He had to have Siegfried and Roy on.

They came out and leveled the place.

And you know, up until the end of their show, they were still hot and they left on top.

And you know, we can thank Siegfried and Roy, credit Siegfried and Roy for the magic boom in Las Vegas and the mecca it has become.

The magicians who are performing today, in large part, including Penn and Teller, people like Penn-- including David Copperfield, who knew them well-- were inspired by their stage show.

We have 25, at least, headlining magicians in Las Vegas right now.

And every one of them will talk at length about what Siegfried & Roy meant to them.

And not to mention Cirque.

They got their inspiration also from the way Siegfried and Roy presented shows and how they handled their staging.

Difficult to calculate and difficult to put in context what they meant to entertainment in Las Vegas.

-Howard?

-Fascinating at the time, when they opened in 19-- they didn't open right away.

The Mirage opened in November of 1989.

Siegfried and Roy's show wasn't ready yet.

There was, it was just this, this local wait.

When is this going to happen?

They did create a space in the south entrance, which is now a Mexican restaurant, where they had a, like a park area for the tigers.

And there was a big glass partition, and people can go in there and look at the tigers.

The tigers would run up to the glass and jump on, you know, jump on the glass.

And so that was an attraction that they, you know, he brought in on that south end.

But their show didn't, I don't think it kicked off until, it may have been February of '90, if I remember correctly, because I got the phone call that afternoon and said, They're opening tonight.

Come on down.

[laughter] So it was-- -When can you be here?

-Yeah.

So it was fascinating.

-Josh, you said that you saw them as a child?

I think you said that off-camera.

-I did.

This predates The Mirage when they were at The Frontier.

Yeah, I remember they had an early show, which was more family friendly; and then they had a late show that was more sort of adult oriented.

-And you discussed or talked about how you felt when you saw those big cats.

-I did, yes.

It was, it was-- as a young child going to see a show like that, really my first exposure to these great animals and just how larger than life they were.

And to see them, you know, perform these feats, alongside amazing magicians, was something that I'll never forget growing up in Vegas.

-Kind of scary, right, John?

But this kind of entertainment, it can no longer exist.

-It wouldn't be accepted.

No, not exotic animals.

No.

But yeah, I saw the show in 2000, and the whole vibe changed when Montecore came out.

The whole room took notice.

I mean, a group of 2,000 people bracing, that's what it was.

And I'll just never forget, like, how powerful that experience was and how nonchalant they were about what they were doing when the cat came out, leading him around like he was a feline.

Very rare and a moment in time, again.

We won't see that happen again.

-I got an interview with them in 2009 for that 20-year anniversary story.

And they were already, you know, they'd retired.

You know, the incident happened with Roy in '03, or something?

-2003.

-But they were-- they talked about The Mirage and Vegas and how much it meant to them in that show.

And putting that, in putting that show together for The Mirage, it was-- I was told I was going to have 10 minutes with them.

I was with them for 45 minutes, and it was-- and they were-- they were just, they loved talking about their experience in Vegas.

And it was, it was a kind of a magical moment.

They were.

They really were.

That really changed a lot of what we see, as John said, on the showrooms on the Strip.

-And what we will not see.

But is that because of what happened in 2003?

And what is your take on what happened in 2003, because there are different reports.

-We've talked about this.

I think it's a matter of semantics now.

I don't know.

I'm a son of a retired veterinarian.

My dad said, If you ever tried to hold a house cat that wants to do harm to you... You know?

Imagine a 500- or 600-pound tiger.

And Siegfried said, If that animal wanted to do harm, he would have been finished.

You know, really.

So that's-- I think that there was confusion in the show.

Obviously, the act broke, the cat got confused, Roy fell, disruption, and it was at least a moment of confusion.

And it was a loose act.

That's what I come away with.

I don't know-- -It was Montecore that got his teeth in his neck?

-The cat broke, walked toward the stage, Roy popped him on the nose with the microphone, backed up, fell over his paw.

Montecore grabs him, drags him off the stage, the stagehands hit the-- hit the cat with a fire extinguisher to basically save Roy's life.

He went code blue two times according to Bernie Yuman.

The rest is history.

But we had Siegfried & Roy even after that, represented at The Mirage through The Habitat and the Dolphin Habitat, and the exotic cats were out there.

And one thing about that.

I think it was on Thursdays.

Once a week, Siegfried would go out there unannounced and kind of commiserate and communicate with the guests, especially children and do his thing where he'd produce a quarter off your arm, one of those medallions, and still do his little act, do close up magic.

That was his performance.

That was Siegfried's performance platform.

He never wanted to be on stage in a show without Roy ever after that happened.

We talked about this.

What about producing a show?

They kind of did a dance show for a while, Havana Nights, that didn't really work out.

They brought Darren Romeo on stage for a while.

But there was no Siegfried & Roy stage show and no representation other than The Habitat after that happened.

That was all at The Mirage.

-So then, when their show was over, following this attack, if we can label it that, what impact did it have?

-I don't know what-- I think Vegas was already changing, the shows were changing.

We had a lot of the Cirque shows already, were already coming in.

I think what really changed for The Mirage was just the ownership.

When Steve sold out in, sold the whole company in 2000, MGM comes in and owns it.

It's part of the MGM's, you know, conglomerate of Strip resorts.

It just became-- they were trying to sell it for several years before Hard Rock entered the picture.

They just wanted-- they moved away.

They sold the Circus Circus.

They wanted to get out of that end of the Strip, from the center heading north.

They wanted to get out and focus everything where they're at down south, between City Center and all their other properties.

-Josh, how big of a deal was that purchase back in 2000?

-I mean, it was, for MGM Resorts, it was game changing.

That was really kind of the true sort of beginning of the iteration of MGM Resorts that exists today, which is this multi-property dominant force, not only on the Las Vegas Strip, but also around the country.

They picked up a great asset in Beau Rivage in Biloxi, Mississippi, as well with that transaction.

-Bellagio and Treasure Island.

-Bellagio and Treasure Island.

Bellagio, in and of itself, goes without saying.

You know what that represents.

And so not only did that help them broaden their portfolio geographically, but also in terms of scaling and level of offering on the Las Vegas Strip.

It brought Bellagio into the fold, which immediately makes you the dominant luxury player on the Strip.

-It was interesting.

For a while, the company was known as MGM Mirage.

-Yes.

-That was their corporate name.

And then I remember was the-- it was an event.

It was after City Center opened.

So it probably would have been like 2010.

Then CEO Chairman Jim Murren said, We're dropping Mirage.

We're going to be MGM Resorts.

So fascinating thing is, MGM, in the sale to Hard Rock, kept the name Mirage.

They own the rights to the name and the trademark Mirage.

I don't know what they'll end up doing with it.

Maybe nothing.

Who knows what they might do.

It's just one of those things, they hung onto that.

-You can't let that go.

You have to-- -Yeah.

-So then you fast forward to 2022, and MGM Resorts is selling.

And some are saying it's a good time for this to happen.

Others say, No, The Mirage is still relevant.

Josh, where do you stand on that?

-I do think it was a good time to sell.

Not only as, you know, someone that follows MGM Resorts, I think as just sort of a student of the industry, it is the right time to sell and bring in, really, a top-tier operator in Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe.

And with Jim Allen, the CEO there, they bring a level of operating expertise at scale that doesn't really exist on the Strip.

You got to remember, they go back and forth with another tribal casino in terms of generating the most slot revenue within four walls of an existing single casino annually.

And so that brings with it marketing prowess, operating prowess, and just a different way of doing things that I think shakes up the rest of the operators on the Strip.

And ultimately, the customer is who wins in that, in that sort of introduction of the new operator.

-The big part of this, of this whole project, is the guitar hotel that they're going to build.

They're taking out the volcano, and the volcano has seen its days.

But they're going, they're going to build this guitar hotel.

They have one in Florida at the Fort Lauderdale property at Hard Rock Fort Lauderdale.

It's going to be, you know-- -Like 700 feet tall.

-Well, they're talking.

They said the County told them they couldn't do 700 feet.

So it's somewhere like between 600 and 660.

We'll see what happens.

There's a lot we still don't know, what they're going to do with the property, what type of changes they're going to make.

But having this guitar hotel is going to be-- I hate to use the word "iconic," but that's what it will be on the Strip, right along the Las Vegas Boulevard.

As that's developed over time, that's going to be fascinating to see where they go with that.

-John, is The Mirage still relevant?

-You know, it'll change the skyline of the Strip.

That alone is going to be interesting.

We all see-- I see that guitar.

And I was thinking if, Las Vegas, if they want to be different, they can make it--I think that's a Gibson guitar-- they can make it a Fender or something.

You know, do something different with it.

But, yeah, I've heard that 660 number, too, for the height of it.

My sense of The Mirage is that it is about time to get out, because it's still in pretty good condition.

You don't walk through it and, you know, you don't walk through and think, This place is a toilet.

You know, it's still beautiful.

It's still pretty well maintained.

It's still got some great-- I ate at Heritage restaurant.

It's great.

I've been through some of these closings.

I think you too, Howard, at the end.

And I'm remembering the Stardust, I'm remembering The Frontier, I'm remembering Desert Inn, Riviera, the last days of those hotels, the Sands.

I visited the Sands before they imploded that when I moved to Las Vegas.

I'm going, This place is a dump.

You know, it's still in good enough condition to where you can remember it in somewhat of its prime, and I think that is important, because it's still a beautiful place.

I just think that the investment in the hotel really ceased near the end of when MGM Resorts owned it.

That's important.

There was no path going forward for that, under that ownership, that made sense.

-It was interesting.

What Steven Wynn said years ago was what his mistake-- he said one mistake with The Mirage was the rooms.

They're small.

They're not-- you couldn't-- they're not the rooms what we see nowadays.

So what Hard Rock is gonna do is probably going to really gut that tower and gut the old tower.

I think the Y-shaped tower will be there.

That was designed by Joel Bergman.

That was the first Y-shaped tower on the Strip, and Joel was so proud of that.

I like Joel Bergman.

He was a wonderful, wonderful person.

But that will still be there.

But it's going to look a lot-- it's going to look a lot different.

And as you said, the skyline, that will change.

I mean, the skyline.

But the Vegas skyline has changed how many times now?

-In recent years.

-Yeah, just in the last few years.

So, yeah, I think-- I walked through it a couple Saturdays ago with my wife.

I wanted to see it one last time.

And we went through it and walked.

The gift shop, they still sell the little replicas of the volcano.

And they have the Mirage T-shirts and everything like that.

-I'm glad you bring up the volcano.

Do we know when its last eruption is?

Does anyone know?

-I think the 16th.

-Is it?

Yeah-- -It closes down when the hotel does, and it won't-- there's no version of it coming back.

-They covered it up during the Super Bowl.

Remember, they turned into Paramount Mountain.

-Yes.

-But the volcano, along with being able to see the dolphins and the tigers, but then-- -The tigers are long gone.

The volcano is going away.

-That whole idea of a free attraction, was that kind of new back at the time?

I mean, from the sidewalk, you can see this volcano, you can go inside.

You don't have to pay anything, and there's entertainment.

-I think if you look at casino design and you study it, up to the point predating The Mirage, you have properties like Caesar's Palace that were really quite removed from Las Vegas Boulevard and the pedestrian traffic and just everyone that wasn't in the building.

What Steve Wynn did with bringing that volcano right to Las Vegas Boulevard was bring that Mirage experience to the masses and really provide you a pretty compelling reason, in my mind, to make your way into the building to check out everything else that was going on.

And once you got in there, you did see, you know, you saw the atrium.

You saw these-- depending on when you walked in there, you saw these mermaid bronze statues, and there were just reasons to beck and call.

And the way that the aisles are created to draw your eye inward even more, without all the straight lines and a lot of curvilinear sort of design, it was purpose built to suck people into the depths of it.

-The funniest thing is Steve Wynn said years later, because you remember now with Wynn Las Vegas, he built that lake.

It's behind a mountain.

He said his mistake was he put the volcano out at the front.

He put the Bellagio lake out front.

He wanted to bring people in.

Like he did bring people in, but he wanted it-- wanted people-- he wanted to hide that now, which is what he did with Wynn Las Vegas.

So he hid everything so people come in and then people in the property would see that lake that's there now.

-You have to actually go inside to see it.

-He had that little pond on the corner.

It's not quite the same thing.

-But yeah, the volcano stopped traffic.

I mean, it was just, it was just who builds a volcano on Las Vegas Boulevard?

-I'm sort of remembering this.

In talking to Elaine Wynn a couple of years ago, December of '22, at length about this whole design strategy, the volcano, straight away, Steve Wynn's idea.

The backing up of the porte-cochére off the Strip and that distance, Steve Wynn's idea.

They thought he was nuts for the volcano.

They thought it would go off and repel people.

No, it drew people in.

The aquarium at the registration desk, that's amazing.

I just last night-- it was Sunday.

I was, again, just gazing at this thing, you know, 20,000 gallons, all these 400 and something fish, for people just so they could look at during registration.

And then there was this long walk from the registration desk to the hotel rooms.

Another thing that Elaine Wynn talked about, I didn't-- I didn't agree with the fact that we're going to take people all the way through this atrium, through the casino, to the hotel rooms.

And Steve Wynn was like, We want to make the discovery of the rooms an experience unto itself.

So you've got people, Josh said it, coming in from the Strip: volcano, mermaids at the right time, aquarium, atrium, you know, fancy casino playing area to the elevators.

You've already been entertained by the time you check in.

-Before we run out of time, we do have to talk about The Beatles Love-- -Yes.

- --and its significance.

It's the show that took over the theater where Siegfried and Roy used to perform.

Why was it special?

2006 is when it started, an 18-year run.

-It was a big effort.

It was an ambitious and, you know, adventurous production, the only licensed Beatles live performance in the world for its entire run.

So you had to get all the surviving Beatles and their estates to agree on this show with this circus company.

Not easy.

Not easy to get, you know, Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney to agree on what this show was going to look like, for starters.

But it was, yeah, it was George Harrison and Guy Laliberte's friendship at the time helped spark this.

And McCartney and Harrison went to see "O" and loved "O," and they said, We think we can do this.

And I'll tell you, the music of that show and the way that it was brought into the production under the stewardship of Giles Martin, Sir George Martin's son, from the Beatles, made that work, because if you screw with Beatles music, you don't care what is going on acrobatically in the show.

And they made that work.

And Giles was there on Sunday night.

A unique show, another one that was a moment in time; you'll never see another Love again.

-First one that was in the round, too, if I remember correctly.

And it was the first sort of major licensed property, entertainment property on the Las Vegas Strip.

Again, the first of many.

-Yeah.

- Michael Jackson came after.

-Yes, about seven years later, yeah.

And they tried this with Elvis too.

They said, Okay, we've got the Beatles in Cirque.

Let's do Elvis in Cirque.

Easier said than done.

The Jackson show does work, though.

It's another one.

-The Jackson show is great.

-Yeah.

It's probably aggressive as well, but wonderful experience.

-Josh, you had brought up earlier how the tourists, the consumer, is going to benefit from the new ownership at The Mirage, which will be the Hard Rock Las Vegas.

Let's talk about this ownership, the first Native American tribe to have a stake on the Las Vegas Strip.

-Make it to the Strip, yeah.

-Native American involvement in gaming dates back to the '70s.

So why did it take till 2022 for this to happen?

-Well, I mean, there have been tribal operators and groups that have gotten pretty close to the Las Vegas Strip, right, to the east and to the west of the Strip.

-The Palms.

-The Palms.

And then Mohegan's son-- -San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

-Exactly, San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, and then the Mohegan tribe, Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, operating, although that's coming to an end, at Virgin Hotels.

The Strip represented kind of the last market, the last jurisdiction that really hadn't had a lot of tribal influence.

And the Hard Rock, as we were talking, and the Seminoles, before the show, had-- the Strip represented a special place for them.

And in fact, when they were picking up all of the memorabilia when the Hard Rock closed and was, you know, the transformation of Virgin Hotels began, I remember them loading everything into a truck that said something to the effect of "We'll be back soon" on the side of it, sort of predicting the fact that they were going to end up exactly where they did.

-Jim Allen, the CEO of Hard Rock, was at the Global Gaming Expo, what, December 2022, and they bought that year.

And he kept on, talked about, was asking him, What about Vegas?

You guys are still looking at Vegas?

And they wanted-- they wanted a location.

They didn't just want, you know, to get a casino in Vegas.

And when they worked the deal with MGM for The Mirage, it just made sense.

It's Center Strip.

They're going to build this guitar hotel at the front.

So it just seems that they found what they wanted, and that's why we're finally getting a Hard Rock here.

-Gentlemen, we have run out of time.

But thank you so much for joining Nevada Week.

And thank you for watching.

For any of the resources discussed, go to vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek, and I'll see you next week on Nevada Week.