New Park Theater not out to eclipse its stars

In her memoir “Reckless,” Chrissie Hynde recalls her formative band years networking in Ohio bars such as the Brick Cottage, “some little cement (and) windowless bar with a stage surrounded by ‘Deer Hunter’-type pill heads drinking beer.”

Back in those days, the Pretenders singer got so used to sleeping on floors she could “no longer sleep in a bed.” But on Saturday, the Pretenders open for Stevie Nicks to inaugurate Park Theater.

With the $90 million new venue arriving eight months after T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas has powered through the recession to return to the cutting edge of theater technology.

At the Park, that’s synonymous with video “projection mapping,” which has been seen in shows as small as “X Burlesque” at the Flamingo and as large as Cirque du Soleil’s “Michael Jackson One” at Mandalay Bay and Criss Angel’s Luxor reboot, “Mindfreak Live!”

The Monte Carlo’s new venue comes with 11 high-definition projectors, which can project a continuous image from the 135-by-40-foot wall/screen on the left side of the stage, keep it going across the stage proscenium and connect it over to an equal-sized wall on the right side of the stage.

That’s 7,839 square feet in all, quite possibly more space than the Brick Cottage bar.

Stevie Nicks has been singing since she joined Lindsey Buckingham’s band Fritz on the Quad of Stanford University in 1967. She never looked back for nearly 50 years, so the Park may not even be the first brand-new venue she’s played. But neither Nicks nor the eternally punk-rock Hynde are likely to find Saturday’s environment over-the-top posh.

“It was important to have a nice look to it but always keep in mind that the true star is going to be performing on stage. It’s not the space itself,” says Oliver Berthiaume-Berge, head designer and architect for the theater’s design firm, the Montreal-based Sceno Plus.

The same company also worked on the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, which opened in 2003. The Colosseum went for an upscale, vibe, but the result included two balconies, the upper one offering fairly distant views for low-end ticket-holders.

The Park seats more people than the Colosseum, but with only one balcony and more flexibility. Patrick Miller, the Monte Carlo’s general manager, calls it “a mini-luxury arena” because it can host concerts, mixed martial arts or even e-sports.

“Here we tried to stay a bit more neutral so we can really concentrate on the artist and the video content,” Berthiaume-Berge says. “It will be elegant and distinguished, but at the same time (the look) will not override the events.”

A fully seated theater setup hosts 5,200 people. But take out the retractable seats on the floor and capacity goes up to 6,318. Curtain off the balcony and it cuts down to 2,400. “You would never even know it was there,” Miller says.

Or put a boxing ring on the floor, remove the subwoofers under the stage and put riser seats on the stage itself for more of an arena vibe.

“This really gives you the best compromise between the design and a transformable venue,” Berthiame-Berge says. “I think the next generation of theaters are going to be more and more like that.”

VIDEO-MAPPING THE FUTURE

Ten years ago, Cirque du Soleil’s big challenge was to synchronize enough projectors to fill the curved screens on the circular walls of “Love” at The Mirage. This year, “Love” celebrated a reboot in which projections turn the floor into a video surface as well.

Projection mapping is the ability to cast a nondistorted image “over architectural surfaces, not just screen surfaces,” says Ryan Westphal, assistant head of projections for “Michael Jackson One.”

All innovation is gradual, and early versions of projection mapping could be seen on the floating stage deck of “Ka” during its climactic battle scene. Now, the projectors in the Michael Jackson tribute can not only lock an image onto a piece of scenery, but move along with it as the scenic piece moves across the stage.

“It’s become an acceptable design element to fill a room,” says David Dovell, operations production manager for “One.” “Once you realize you could have a blank canvas, that if we have enough servers and machinery behind it, we can change this room into anything. That has pushed the envelope in the creation and production design of our shows as well.”

When the hip-hop dance troupe Jabbawockeez was downsized to a former lounge at the MGM Grand, the stage and its framing walls were painted white and filled with motion-simulating video created by the designers of Justin Timberlake’s “20/20 Tour.”

The 2013 debut of Cirque du Soleil’s Jackson tribute beat the Park to the idea of spilling a visual beyond the formal stage walls and creating new “screens” out of the theater’s side walls. The 19 projectors across the front of the theater “all blend together to create one giant screen basically, from edge to edge,” Westphal says.

“But the real technology behind it is the servers driving it,” Westphal says. “For us the major change was media servers, and having computers that are powerful enough to drive basically enough content to fill the entire theater from wall to wall. Which for us (at Cirque) is an array of computers all tied together.”

The Park can map its space with 11 projectors, some of them 4K, bringing still brighter images with higher resolution, much like the electronics stores now pushing you to upgrade your HDTV to one of the new 4K models this Christmas.

Dovell can see upcoming Park headliners such as Ricky Martin doing what Cirque has done, replacing a lot of practical scenery with video projections. “We can turn the room into anything you want,” he says. “It’s much simpler than bus and trucks and scenery.

“You look now at projections as a driving field in production,” he adds. “You’re starting to talk about laser projectors and different things that are just going to blow our minds in the next few years. It’s an exciting world to be in — and difficult to catch up on.”

Contact Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288. Follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.