Cirque Viva Elvis Bloggers Night Part 1

We were back with Cirque a couple weeks ago to celebrate the opening of their newest show, Viva Elvis.  This newest resident show is hosted at the new Aria Hotel in City Center.

It was my first opportunity to visit the recently opened City Center and although we spent most of the time in the Aria, over all the place was very impressive.  My party arrived early to pick up our tickets, and were nearly rundown by Gene Simmons body guards.  Quite an auspicious start to the evening.

We made our way to the ticket booth, procured our passes and headed out to explore the Aria before the show.  We took a tour around the second and first floors, checking out the bars and looking for a place to have a drink.  We finally settled on the centrally located City Bar for one of their signature cocktails.  Some other friends found us there (thanks GoWalla!) and joined us there for a pre show drink.

We headed back up to the theater and watched a bit of the "Blue Carpet", most of the stars waited until really late to start heading into the show.  There was really too many cameras and press to get a really good look at the folks "arriving".  They had been partying at a pre show event next to the "Blue Carpet".

We all ended up heading into the show to find our seats, since we were scattered in a few different sections.  @Stormyiz and I ended up in a row with some other friends and in a good spot to watch the celebreties.  Notable, along with our decriptors were:

Chris "Mr Big" Noth, actually we watch the Good Wife, his current show, so we keep telling people how good a show it is.

Lawrence Fishburn, yeah the guy from the Matrix.

Hilton Perez, who cares, but apparently he knows that really short guy Ryan Seacrest.

Jeff Probst who looked just like he does on Survivor with little rolled up sleeves and epalets, I should talk, I just

purchased stock in epaleted shirts.  The eighties are back!

That guy from Prison Break.

Regis Philbin and his wife, who ignored the ushers request to wait for someone to bring you to your seat, she thought we

had their row and they needed 3 seats, not the 2 empties between us and another couple.

Andrew Dice "you can see him from space" Clay

NPH, the NPH, with his bow tie shirt and boyfriend.  If I have to explain this one, you really shouldn't be reading my blog, or back to the 2008 entries and figure out.

We spotted some others, but really there were a lot of Vegas celebs and minor tv celebs, still it was fun if you watch tv.  A lot of our friends apparently do not, hence the interesting descriptors.

So on with show, in the next blog post, forthcoming.

Catching Up

Falling behind on the ole blogging, I have one huge event in the Cirque Viva Elvis premier that I am working on now, trying to knock that out.  There were some other small events in the past few weeks that may or may not end up getting covered, including a Hilton Tweetup, Snug Crawl and others.

Upcoming is the Lake Las Vegas Beer Fest in a couple Saturdays, St. Patrick's Day and many Gowalla inspired trips.  Hoping to get caught up soon, really need to start pushing from the mobile again, because I am out there busy doing these things, leaving little time to write about them!

Cirque Mystère Bloggers Night

Las Vegas is a burgeoning social media hub, as casinos and businesses up and down the strip and through out the Las Vegas Valley continue to promote their wares. One of those businesses is Cirque du Soleil (@Cirque), spear headed by social media director Jess Berlin (@JessBerlin). They have been hosting bloggers at their shows for some time now and I finally had the opportunity to attend a show last night.

On a side note, I have been in Vegas for close to 7 years now and I will be living here for the for seeable future. So it may come as a surprise that I have never seen a Cirque show, or any show for that matter, in Vegas. Once you become a local, the strip casinos and it's offerings tend to be a place you go only when you have visitors from out of town.

That being said, I got out of work early, headed home to change and down to Treasure Island early to get some dinner prior to the show and to make an evening out of it. We started at Pho for a nice dinner, before heading over to the box office to meet up with Jess and a large group of other local bloggers.

Once we met up, we found out we would have the opportunity to meet some of the cast members and take photographs prior to the show. That was great, but I was poorly prepared with my phone battery in the red and not having brought even my camera. Luckily a lot of other people had their cameras and I will snag some pictures from someone else later.

After a round of pictures and questions, we headed to the snack bar to load up on some popcorn and soda before heading to our seats. For the next 90 minutes we were treated to an amazing display of arobatics, wonderful music, spattered with bits of slapstick humor and some dance routines.

I am not going to try and get too deep into the show, so much goes on at the same time, it's difficult to take it all in at a single viewing. There is constant movement in multiple parts of the stage, up high, down low, distractions to transition set pieces, yet the transitions in themselves are highly choreographed. I will say though, if like me, you have never seen a Cirque show, you should definetly make it a point to do so.

In speaking with others, most of whom have seen many, if not all of the other Cirque shows in town (Criss Angel Believe, Kà, Love, O, Viva Elvis & Zumanity), we discussed the flow and themes of the show. The general consensus was that this is the most acrobatic of the shows in town and for a number of other bloggers, their favorite.

It was definetly a memorable night and an amazing show and I want to thank Jess again for putting it together and being an awesome host. We definetly look forward to doing it again in the near future.

We wrapped up with some drinks at the Breeze Bar, with about half a dozen of the attendees. As usual we got into the Foursquare (@FourSquare) vs Gowalla (@GoWalla) debate among other topics. But those are for future blogs!

                 (Title: Green lizard  Picture credit: Al Seib)