Crazy Girls – Review

[Note: Crazy Girls closed at the Riviera in May 2015, and has since reopened at Planet Hollywood. My review below is of the show at the Riv. I’ll update my review when I see the show in its new home soon. – A.S.]

Crazy Girls opened at the Riviera in 1988. Not many Vegas production shows run uninterrupted for 25 years, so they must be doing something right.

One of the things they definitely did right was install that bronze relief of the Crazy Girls dancers at the front of the casino on the Strip. To celebrate the show’s 10th anniversary in 1998, the Riv commissioned Santa Fe sculptor Michael Conine to create a life-size rearview bronze sculpture of the seven dancers standing in a row, arms around each others’ waists, wearing only their thongs. When the Riv unveiled the artwork, the National Organization for Women launched a formal protest, claiming the sculpture degraded women, reducing them to nothing but bronze pieces of ass (literally!). A Nevada congressman even tried to get the state legislature to ban the sculpture from public display as indecent.

Las Vegans, however, loved it (is this a great town or what?) and newspapers all over the world carried photos and stories about it. Today, the brassy bottoms of the sculpture continue to be rubbed daily by tourists, who often pose for photos with the artwork. The sculpture is widely considered a Las Vegas landmark, right up there with the Mirage volcano, the Treasure Island pirate ship, and the Fremont Street Experience.

Crazy Girls was one of the first Vegas shows to emphasize topless dancers, minimize the variety acts, and completely do away with big production numbers. But when I saw the show about 5-6 years ago, I thought it was on its last legs. The dance routines struck me as tired and unimpressive. Most of the numbers, including the few solos, were performed with lip-synching. Fortunately, those old problems are long gone.

The Revamped Show is Hot!

The show’s gone through multiple revamps since then and it just keeps getting better. Expect to see some painfully gorgeous women, really hot dancers who get down to the tiniest g-strings you’ll ever see (you almost don’t see them). All seven dancers are talented and bursting with personality. If you’re a tit man, there’s not much silicone in this group. (Only one dancer had an obvious boob job.) Most of the girls are small-breasted.

I knew this show had gone through some big changes right from the opening number, when seven dancers in little black dresses come into the theater aisles dancing to Motley Crue’s hard-rockin’ “Girls, Girls, Girls” and lose their dresses on stage at the end of the song. There are now quite a few rock numbers in the show, including Aerosmith’s “Pink,” which involves four dancers doing a striptease on a revolving pink bed with dynamite floor work—or in this case, mattress work—with more leg spreads in their little pink thongs than you’d expect to see in a casino show.

The lip-synching has been reduced to a few classic show tunes that work. “Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets),” from the musical Damn Yankees, is performed by a solo dancer who starts out dressed in a skimpy schoolgirl outfit and gets down to her g-string while writhing around on a giant stuffed phallus. The whole group dances and strips to Ruth Wallis’ hilarious “You Gotta Have Boobs,” from her off-Broadway hit, Boobs: The Musical. The only other lip-synched song was “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You, When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?” sung cabaret-style by Eartha Kitt.

The show lasts about 70 minutes and it moves fast. In addition to the seven dancers, comic/magician Tony Douglas does a couple of short sets of entertaining  parlor magic. He’s a funny guy. It’s his job to give the dancers and crew a breather and you might need a breather too. The dancers work so hard it gets my heart going faster just watching them.