Not many performers have backstage dressing rooms in a luxurious league with Celine Dion's. Hers is less a niche for primping and idling than a rambling private apartment, reached by way of a secure, hidden garage deep below Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas. It not only has a large dining room, where she can entertain guests, but also a smaller one, where she can sup alone. Beyond the brightly lighted area for hair and makeup is a softly lighted chamber for massages. All that belting and chest thumping are murder on her back.
But the most striking aspect of Dion's spread at Caesars is its uncanny resemblance to her home, which overlooks a manmade lake about 30km away. Using the same interior decorator, she created a doppelgaenger domicile, with a similarly muted palette of browns, beiges, and grays; similar contemporary furniture, a similar gallery of photographs of her husband, Rene Angelil, and their four-year-old son, Rene Charles.
People in the Las Vegas entertainment world titter that Dion, an unabashedly indulgent mother, wanted to make sure that her son never felt displaced. Dion says the reason is simpler. "We are comfortable in this environment," she said one recent afternoon at her home, where she and her husband sat on a patio off the living room. "Why not make ourselves comfortable over there?"
Las Vegas has been nothing if not comfortable to Dion, who made her debut here two years ago as the resident talent at Caesars, performing about five shows a week in a 4,100-seat theater built specifically for her, at a cost of roughly US$95 million. Now instead of flying to a new city every day, she slips into the back seat of a black Mercedes for a 20-to-30-minute commute. Instead of adjusting to different working conditions in each new venue, she enjoys a special climate control system that maintains a voice-soothing 55 percent humidity level onstage, just like the level in her house.
"The traveling and the stadiums -- the kick of being on the road -- is like a rock 'n' roll song," she said, as she sank into one of the tan leather seats in that Mercedes. Within reach were a Tiffany's catalog and a surgical mask in case ash from desert wildfires hung in the air.
"No ballads will take a rock 'n' roll song away. And no rock 'n' roll song will ever take a ballad away. To me, it's like pretty smooth riding here."
To varying degrees, Dion has been joined on that easier street -- that ballad of a boulevard -- by Barry Manilow, who has planted roots at the Las Vegas Hilton, where he has a 1,700-seat auditorium and a rooftop suite. By Elton John, who performs in Dion's moist theater when she takes vacations. By the comedians Rita Rudner and David Brenner, who are Vegas residents now.
They are turning Vegas into a sort of non-retirement retirement home for performers who are weary of the road, but who have not yet been consigned to the nostalgic kitsch of Wayne Newton or Don Rickles. They are drawn here in part by the same changes that have recently attracted other new residents and new kinds of tourists. Some of the world's most revered chefs, including the Frenchmen Alain Ducasse and Joel Robuchon, have opened or are about to open restaurants here. George Clooney is building a hotel. Hollywood stars are buying condominiums. The television gossip show Extra has even established a Vegas bureau.
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