Boobs on Parade

Dinner and a show. That’s what I needed last night. A big hunk of meat and some dancing showgirls (not at the same time, of course). Showgirls with sequins and feathers and not much else. So I dined at Bellagio’s Prime where my waiter graciously proffered his opinion on the culinary differences between a porterhouse and a filet, a peppercorn New York and a roasted rib-eye while I quickly sucked down a Manhattan Bella—Knob Creek bourbon, sweet vermouth, Dubonnet, and a brandied cherry—hoping I could order another round before the waiter was done with his spiel.

The steak was huge. The Manhattans wonderfully potent. Thoughts of my gambling debacle started to fade. And just as I was starting to feel better about myself, the fountains in the 8-acre lake fronting the restaurant exploded in a dancing flurry like enchanted straw brooms from Fantasia. A chorus line of frothy water towers, like long lithesome legs, swaying left, right, kicking straight up into the air. Lovely. Erotic. By the time the water show finished, I was ready for the real thing. Time for Jubilee! at Bally’s.

Here’s what I don’t understand about this classic Boobs on Parade revue: Why do they literally flesh out the entire show in the first five minutes? It’s too much. Too many—way too many—boobs. The theatre is just barely dark when wave after wave of spangled and beaded showgirls—those “scintillating beauties,” as my program calls them—assaults the audience from every angle. They crowd the stage, the opera boxes, and even drop down from overhead the audience.

Everywhere you look, topless women. Ten, twenty, a hundred of them! It’s sensory overload. And then poof! They’re gone and the show settles into a mixture of special effects (the Titanic sinks once again), dubious historical vignettes (Look! It’s a newsclip of doughboys shooting Huns in Armentieres and here come some naked showgirls to the rescue!), and crowd-pleasing illusions as a magician makes tigers and cars vanish in thin air.

But here’s the thing that really stumps me: You’ve got something like 50 bare-breasted women strutting back and forth across the stage in these enormously over-produced vignettes and yet every single boob you see looks the same. Even the nipples are the same. Ever woman looks to be about a 32 or 34B with modest nipples the size of raspberries. There’s no real jiggling going on here because there’s nothing to jiggle. And the conformity, in the end, is monotonous. It’s safe to say that once you’ve seen one pair of tits in this show, you’ve seen them all. And what fun is that?