Mondays Dark streaming live so entertainers can entertain, fans can still listen
It’s kind of a virtual-reality version of live entertainment.
Directed not to commiserate en masse, a few Vegas performers are live-streaming during the regularly scheduled Mondays Dark show at The Space. The event benefiting Refuge for Women Las Vegas is available beginning at 9 p.m. Hit mondaysdark.com to watch and support.
The show is similar to any other Mondays Dark performance over the past six-plus years. Event founder and Space proprietor Mark Shunock introducing the theme of “Women Who Rock” and leading the charity effort.
But the show will play only to four cameras around the room to a remote audience. The eight-piece band is separated at a safe distance, with a rotating group of singers, in otherwise vacant Space space. This will be a highly sanitized show; the mics are being constantly wiped down. So are the musicians’ hands and instruments.
It’s kind of a virtual-reality version of live entertainment.
Get used to it. Shunock is planning a telethon-style fundraiser from 5 p.m.-midnight April 6, benefiting entertainment-industry types who have lost work because of the coronavirus outbreak. Yes, that list is as long as the Strip, with virtually every professional performer in the city suffering lost gigs and serious financial shortfalls.
A fund is now being established, to be dubbed the Mondays Dark Performers Fund, specifically for Vegas entertainers. This is all in the infantile stages, naturally. This crisis is changing so fast it’s difficult to plan even when to buy TP (just during this writing the UFC has temporarily closed its Vegas offices). But it is s start.
“This will be be positive, and will support our entertainment family,” Shunock says. “We can help a ton of people.” The “we,” in this instance, includes yours truly as part of the core group assembling this effort.
Expect an evolution and shifts of field in this new project. But somehow, Vegas entertainers gonna entertain, that’s a promise.
Contact John Katsilometes at jkatsilometes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @johnnykats on Twitter, @JohnnyKats1 on Instagram.
