Long farewell for Siegfried & Roy

Siegfried & Roy never had a proper goodbye.

The legendary Las Vegas illusionists were never sure how long they would carry on. But retirement was forced on them in October 2003 when Roy Horn was mauled onstage by one of his show tigers.

Six years after Horn's determined rehabilitation, the two returned for a brief performance Saturday night that was both a comeback and a farewell, performing in front of about 1,000 people at the Keep Memory Alive fundraiser for the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute.

The short performance that capped a live auction began with a hooded torch-bearing acolyte walking onstage after the introduction, "The spirit of Siegfried and Roy has just arrived."

Some audience members upfront seemed to recognize right away that it was Horn. but it wasn't until the end of the performance, when the duo materialized one of their signature white tigers, that the masks came off and the two revealed themselves to a rousing ovation.

There were no words spoken to the audience beyond brief recorded bits of wisdom played over the speakers.

While there was no mention made to the crowd, their manager, Bernie Yuman, said through a publicist that the tiger in Saturday's show was Montecore, the tiger that inflicted the near-fatal injury on Roy.

Siegfried Fischbacher and Horn were trying to figure out when and how to bow out gracefully even before the accident that put an abrupt end to their show on Oct. 3, 2003.

The Mirage hit had been running for 131/2 years and 5,750 performances.

Horn had just celebrated his 59th birthday. But Fischbacher already had passed 60.

Questions of how long their bodies were up to the task were just as relevant as whether Cirque du Soleil and the new Celine Dion spectacular had eclipsed the Mirage spectacle that reinvented Las Vegas entertainment.

The magicians' real age became part of the grand illusion, except on the rare occasions when knee surgery or the flu would force a cancelation.

"The pain and drama and all that comes with the territory. That's irrelevant," Horn once said with a dismissive wave. Audiences "come to forget their problems. They don't need to hear about ours."

But the fact is, the two had worked tirelessly, with few breaks, from their earliest inroads on the Strip, as a 12-minute Tropicana "Folies Bergere" specialty act in 1967.

"For the first 15 years in Las Vegas, we worked seven days a week with no vacation and three shows on Fridays and Saturdays," Fischbacher once noted. "And we had to do it. There was no other choice."

The duo were the highest-paid specialty act in Las Vegas by 1981, when they opened their own show, "Beyond Belief," with backing from circus impresarios Irvin and Kenneth Feld.

The Frontier opus logged 3,500 performances for more than 3 million people.

The Mirage was the next big milestone.

"Sometimes it upsets me that Cirque has become so huge and everybody puts them on a pedestal," production designer Andy Walmsley, whose stage sets include "American Idol," noted recently. "People forget it was actually that Siegfried & Roy show that really changed show business. ... It was that show that really changed the Vegas landscape."

In February 2001, MGM Mirage announced a "lifetime" contract extension that guaranteed the duo at least another four years. By then, however, the stars seemed more excited about a more sensible schedule of eight shows per week.

Magic had driven Siegfried since he was 10 years old, he noted then. "Absolutely nothing else existed in the world. I don't know if this is right, all my life, to just think about one thing."

So it was a forced retirement when the 7-year-old show tiger Montecore turned on Horn, knocking him down and then dragging him from the stage, by most eyewitness accounts.

The tiger had inflicted a deep, near-fatal puncture wound in Horn's neck that kept him on the operating table through the night at University Medical Center's trauma center.

The real damage came with a stroke hours after the initial surgery, one that left Horn with partial paralysis.

But Horn progressed enough through physical therapy that he was able to stand in front of a banquet crowd celebrating his 60th birthday a year later.

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