Base takes its bumps learning on the fly

There’s no arguing the company has interesting ideas. They’ve just been very expensive. And Base has learned some Las Vegas lessons the hard way, as a lot of visitors do on the casino floor.

Now I’m hearing Base has been realigned, with an executive brought in by its private-equity majority investor, Clarity Partners, to monitor operations.

You don’t have to have money on the table to root for good luck with someone who isn’t Cirque du Soleil or AEG Live (which brings concert headliners to Caesars Palace). We need diversity and to pull for things like CeeLo Green’s show to work.

But I haven’t talked to anyone who liked “Loberace.” Not sure where it went off the rails, because if I sat through the meetings, I might have sipped the Kool-Aid too: “We’re doing this show late at night to pull in the club crowd, because CeeLo does great in clubs.”

“Yeah, it’s not really going to be a show as much as a big party. It’ll be nuts. We’ll have a mini-CeeLo, and a Boy George impersonator.”

See? Fun idea. But it’s looking more like the club crowd doesn’t want to sit in a chair or watch anything other than the person they’d like to take home late at night.

Base leases two theaters at Planet Hollywood Resort, and the larger financial risk seems to be Green’s, through his own company, Primary Wave. Did Base encourage Green or try to talk him out of it?

Last week I was trying to get an update on whether Base is going through with another bad idea: hypnotist Marshall Sylver in the larger, 7,000-seat theater at Planet Hollywood. Sylver couldn’t fill 600 seats at Harrah’s Las Vegas a few years ago, and didn’t even bother to perform most of the shows himself.

Caesars Entertainment Corp. appears to have bigger plans for the room, as the widely publicized reports of Britney Spears playing there sound like they could come to fruition at least a few weekends a year. But Base can collect rent from Sylver, as it did from the naive producers of the quick-bust “Surf the Musical” at Planet Hollywood last summer.

The company had quite the learning curve since it entered the market in 2006 with “Phantom — The Las Vegas Spectacular,” after Brian Becker and Scott Zeiger spun off from Live Nation to buy that company’s share of “Phantom.”

“Phantom” turned out to be an upside-down mortgage that could never recoup its initial $35 million investment, even if it was profitable week to week.

The company continues to be bullish on Broadway for the Strip, and the jury is still out on “Million Dollar Quartet” and “Rock of Ages.” Both seem like solid demographic matches for Las Vegas. But there was another bump in the road when “Rock” was forced to convert to an Actors Equity Union show after it opened, raising its costs by about a third.

Hopefully, Base found the right middle path after it seriously cut and realigned the budget of “Peepshow,” and aligned with producer Ross Mollison for “Absinthe,” which is no less creative for being budget-savvy.

Like many a tourist, Base seems to be learning how to have high-roller tastes on a low-roller budget.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at
mweatherford@reviewjournal.com
or 702-383-0288.