He combines raunchy comedy with high-quality international circus acts.

A disrupter in Las Vegas entertainment with the introduction of Absinthe, Ross Mollison, Founder of Spiegelworld, is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

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

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

An Australian native, it was a visiting company of the Moscow Circus that ignited his passion for show business.

Forming a theater marketing agency after college, he'd go on to work with clients like Cirque du Soleil and the Sydney Opera House before conceiving a new approach to contemporary circus.

He's the man behind hit shows like Absinthe and Atomic Saloon Show.

Ross Mollison, founder of the circus and entertainment company Spiegelworld, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-My pleasure, Amber.

-Okay.

Let's go back to five years old in Australia.

This visiting company comes into town.

Was this the legitimate Moscow Circus, because there are various forms of it?

(Ross Mollison) This was the real Moscow Circus.

This was back in the day when it was an enormous circus, and people would turn up.

The Cold War was going, and people would turn up just to see what Russians looked like.

And then, of course, the acrobatics, the circus skill of the Russian population is incredible, because they'd have-- they have theaters all around Russia designed specifically for circus.

And many great friendships were formed over the years through working with the Moscow Circus.

-Back to being five years old, though, it's your neighbors who take you to this circus?

-Right, because they were like Australia's greatest circus fans.

And like to this day, people in trad circus in Australia know them, know their names, because they would go to every circus.

And they'd say, Well, we know Popov the clown.

We know blah, blah, blah.

Do you want to come see the clowns?

And we'd go and watch the circus with them, like five times every season.

-Okay.

So they had the connections, and that is how you met that clown?

-That's exactly right.

And you know, when you're five, six years old and you're wandering around backstage of this incredible circus and you're going inside the caravans and seeing how everybody lives, it's just a magical world.

-I know this because I listened to a speech you gave at the Welcome Conference.

It's on YouTube.

I encourage anyone to go listen to it.

It's about finding the circus within you and maintaining that circus within you.

So in that speech, you said that around, what was it, high school?

When was it that you lost that circus?

-Well, it really is deciding what you want to do in life.

And for me, I'd always loved performing.

I'd played the electric organ and the piano and all these things.

I was a singer in choirs, and then I started doing musicals, but what I really loved, what I eventually found, was the producing side of entertainment.

And once I got into the producing side of entertainment--making the posters, doing the programs--that, to me, was fantastic.

I just loved organizing it all.

-Okay.

In the meantime, you got an economics degree?

-I did.

That took a while, but I eventually finished my economics degree.

And I spent most of my time doing that at the university theater.

-You did tell me, off camera, that your introduction to the United States was at 15 years old.

Why?

-My parents.

In Australia, we have this thing called long service leave.

So my dad and mom could take nine months off work, paid, and go and travel.

So my dad said, We're going to America.

He bought a Rand McNally Atlas, and he mapped out a path around America.

We bought a motor home in New York and then drove around America.

He dropped me off with an auntie and uncle in New Jersey for six months to go to high school here, which was terrifying, and ended up being one of the great experiences of my life.

-How so?

How do you think it impacted you?

-I went to a very strict all-boys, suit-and-tie Presbyterian College in Melbourne.

And I came and I was at high school in Metuchen in New Jersey, and I just learned things that I never thought I would learn and had so much fun there.

-And imagine the confidence that it gave you.

Did you ever think you would be back in the United States doing the work that you are currently doing?

-You know, back then, I didn't.

I had no notion of what I was going to do.

At that time, I think I was going to be a doctor.

You know, I was going to go and do medicine.

But, you know, I just, I think it was my love of entertainment that kept drawing me back to it.

-Okay.

So let's fast-forward.

This is in the couple of weeks following 9/11 in New York City.

You are there to open a show called Puppetry of the Penis.

-My, you're well researched.

Yes, we opened actually two weeks after the 9/11 event.

I was actually living in Bleecker Street at the time, and my friend called me up and said, Oh, my God, this has happened.

And so we walked down to have a look, and I was right next to the first tower when it collapsed.

And you know, it's one of the defining things of my life.

It was, I mean, a terrifying time for everybody in New York and for America and for the world, in fact.

-What are you thinking in that moment about whether to proceed with this show?

-You know, a lot of people said don't.

And it-- given the nature of the show and how stupid an idea it was, it really was the most ridiculous idea.

And we decided to proceed, in any case.

And it took about a month or two to click, but I think eventually people came back around to the idea that they were going to go out again and be entertained.

-What did you learn from deciding to proceed with that?

-I mean, you have to be relentless in entertainment.

You have to be relentless in life.

But you have to keep moving forward.

You have to turn up, and you have to deliver.

And we just kept going, and eventually we found success.

-And those first few audiences ended up being in need of some laughs.

-I think so.

I think so.

-Okay.

So Spiegelworld, how was that birthed?

This is around the same time.

-Yeah.

That came about-- a friend of mine had produced a circus in Edinburgh, tiny little circus in a spiegeltent.

I thought I just saw the future.

I was working with Cirque du Soleil at the time, and Cirque were getting bigger and bigger.

They were touring to 2,500 seat [indistint], and they were going on to arenas, you know, 10-, 15,000 people.

I thought, well, what if we built a unique circus and instead of getting bigger, we got smaller, and we based it all on intimacy and we based it all on comedy.

And I just, I always, obviously, from producing Puppetry of the Penis, which is, you know, a comedy.

It's an unusual show.

I always loved comedy, and so we focused very heavily on the comedy.

I met the gazillionaire, and everything just came together from there.

-What need do you think you were filling by combining circus and, not just comedy, but like I mentioned, raunchy comedy?

-You know, I think-- I think it was just a new approach.

It was just a new way of doing something that had been done for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And going back to the, to the birth of circus, it was always very much about comedy.

But clowning had developed a certain direction, usually because it was used to distract from taking down the lion's cage or putting up the trapeze.

And so it became a distraction, more than a core focus.

And we decided to focus back in and make the comedy the centerpiece of everything we do, which you can tell from Atomic Saloon or from Opium or from Absinthe.

- Absinthe debuted in New York City.

Where?

Will you tell me about the location.

-We started at Pier 17, the South Street Seaport, and we went down there, and everybody said, You're absolutely crazy.

New Yorkers hate the South Street Seaport.

It's a tourist place, and even the tourists don't want to go.

We went down, had a look, and there's this empty pier there.

And I said, My God, this is one of the most beautiful places in New York.

You've got Dumbo, you've got the Brooklyn Bridge, and you've got the Statue of Liberty on the East River here, and it's just beautiful.

So we just put up a big bamboo fence, and we set up our spiegeltent there.

And New Yorkers, we convinced-- we got about two or three audiences to come down, and the thing just exploded, because people went, Yeah, you're right, this is gorgeous.

We want to come here and hang out at the Beer Garden and go and see this, this fantastic show.

-We only have about five minutes left.

How do I cram it all in?

From that speech, though, that didn't exist.

I mean, it did not succeed in the long run.

You were out of money and broke.

-Yeah, we had a really tough time in 2008.

Fortunately-- -Which would make sense with the times.

-Yeah, we were right next to Wall Street.

The place collapsed.

Nobody wanted to come to shows.

It was really, really tough.

I ended up packing up, you know, the pier by myself.

It was a really hard time for us.

But fortunately, we'd done a deal.

We thought at the time, fortunately, to bring Absinthe to Vegas, and it was going in the Fontainebleau hotel.

And Jeff Soffer had seen the show down on the beach when we did it in Miami, South Beach.

He said, Right, I'm building a new hotel, Fontainebleau--he's got the Fontainebleau down there--and you're going to be the central entertainment.

We're like, Great!

We signed this deal.

We're off.

And then that went bankrupt a year later, so that was canceled.

And so it took a long while to get from that spot to getting the site at Caesars Palace.

Eventually, I met a great, great man of Nevada, Gary Selesner, originally from Atlantic City, a New Jersey man.

And he was the president of Caesars Palace and said, Well, I'll give you a shot.

You can put it on the concrete I got out front, and opened here in 2011.

-And what did his fellow colleagues think of your show?

-I mean, it was one of my, one of the strongest memories I've ever had.

There's two things that happened.

We're sitting around the big boardroom table with all the Caesars executives, and one of the senior executives piped up and said, Well, I think this is a terrible idea.

Caesars is a five-star brand.

Having this, this terrible little circus here is, is a bad idea.

But I was also sitting around this table when I heard that Cirque du Soleil was coming, and we decided that was a bad idea, so maybe we should give it a shot.

And then Tom Jenkin was the other guy who was the COO of Caesars, and he just said-- he came and saw it when we first opened, and he said, Well, I'd throw you off my land I hate this so much, but I'm not going to have to worry.

You'll be broke within four weeks.

And fortunately for us, he was-- fortunately for us, he was wrong.

-Terribly wrong.

-Yeah.

And he became a great friend and an enormous supporter of the show.

-Oh, good, once he saw how much money it was making?

-Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's what the casinos are there for.

-Okay.

You have translated that into a restaurant as well.

So Superfrico, which you describe, it's at the Cosmo, as Italian American psychedelic?

-Yeah.

-And like a big, dirty house party.

-Well, it really is just, why do people come to Vegas?

Like, you see them getting off the plane, how excited they are.

You can see them queuing up at the, you know, at the entrance, you know, and some of them have already bought a beer while they're waiting to check into their room.

They're here to have a fun time.

So we said, well, what if we put a little bit of entertainment in there and we do incredibly delicious food and we make a really fun environment?

And Cosmopolitan really supported us in that.

And we launched that restaurant about three years ago, and it's been an enormous hit there.

-It is so much fun.

You have a mozzarella expert who makes mozzarella fresh at the table.

And then, you have pointed this out, but there are people who go there who have no idea what they're in store for, you know, some of the meek little tourists.

And then you watch their faces reacting to these performances, and it's entertainment in and of itself.

-Yeah, it's a really fun place.

And of course, we have the Ski Lodge here.

And again, another unexpected aspect to the whole thing, that you're one minute you're in this Italian American restaurant, the next minute you're in a ski lodge.

And it's snowing, and there's crazy things happening there, too, and people are doing shot skis.

And again, another fun, silly idea for Vegas.

-Okay.

It is 2025, and we're going to be meeting up with you in Nipton, California, at some point this year.

That is the small town that Spiegelworld has bought.

You are renovating.

You are bringing life to this little town.

And what do you ultimately want it to be?

-Ultimately, I want it to be an escape to the circus.

I want people to be able to go out there and stay and have a really beautiful experience and maybe see some elements of the circus, be it art, visual art.

We really love circus arts.

We're looking at putting a trapeze out there.

We've renovated.

There's this enormous pond out there, and we just renovated that.

We're renovating these 70-year-old Spartan Imperial Mansions.

We have 10 of them, and we're making them into beautiful old circus caravans you can come and stay in.

But very, kind of crossing the border between luxury and experience, a bit like Superfrico does.

Like, I think people are surprised that they can go to a circus restaurant, and the food is so delicious because we spend all our time focusing on that.

We want to do the same thing with accommodation in Nipton so it can be a real, a really unexpected escape.

-Ross Mollison, please invite us out there when you are open.

-Anytime.

-Thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-My pleasure.