You know Las Vegas is a city of second chances when even a show can get one. After opening to mostly empty seats in November, Awakening at Wynn Las Vegas is the latest attempt to salvage a big investment — $120 million in this case — with a makeover. Shutting down for more than two months allowed the creative team to “walk away and come back and look at it with fresh eyes,” producer Baz Halpin says.
Paying customers will decide whether it was worth the effort, but the improvement is significant. “It was a tough nut to crack,” Halpin admits, referring to adding songs and choreography, aerialists, more comedy (“It wasn’t that fun”), and that elusive element known as heart. The quest fantasy now stands to lure Marvel-movie families to the Strip’s first story-driven spectacle since Cirque du Soleil’s KÀ.
Datus Puryear, one of the show’s stars, says the challenge was weaving narrative into the cutting-edge stagecraft that’s the genre’s calling card. They did it “in a way that I don’t think any stage has seen before,” Puryear says. The video mapping, revolving stage, colossal puppets by Michael Curry (The Lion King), and even the magic tricks are now in service of the story. Even some of Anthony Hopkins’ recorded narration bit the dust in favor of Puryear speaking live to the audience (gasp), and later singing a Broadway-style “character song” as the pop star of an undersea kingdom.
All progress comes with the added challenge of, “Never mind what you’ve heard.” Las Vegas was never big on formal previews, which social media has undermined on Broadway. But Broadway shows are usually “locked” after opening night, while Las Vegas can just keep tinkering. Sometimes it works: From Le Rêve in the same circular theater where Awakening is now, to Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity and Criss Angel Believe — which basically trimmed all of Cirque’s input for the most extreme makeover of them all. And sometimes it doesn’t work: Zarkana was a Cirque show about another magician, but Cirque made his character disappear in a reboot. And when that didn’t work, Aria vanished both the show and the theater.