Stuff 2 Do in Vegas

by Ken Van Vechten

A Killer Twist

Coming to you live from Las Vegas via San Diego (and in some anti-Rockwellian way, the Heartland), it’s “Twisted Farm Food.” Hash House A Go Go way out west on Sahara serves up massive portions of dinner, lunch and breakfast fare that defies imagination, and the play here is breakfast. We recently got through about half of a truly twisted Benedict of sage-fried chicken over mashers, layered with spinach, bacon, hothouse tomatoes and scrambled eggs, covered in flamed mozzarella and dressed in chipotle cream; no effete Hollandaise here. Or if you want it hot off the griddle, the “single” flapjack can do in a hearty eater. Unlike so many places in Sin City that serve it up big, this place doesn’t add lousy to the equation. And from the “Indiana Favorites” portion of the menu, it’s a pint-and-a-half of Bud served up with an order of bacon. Viva Terra Haute. www.hashhouseagogo.com

Bombs the Word

There’s a popular Vegas image showing downtown in the days of yore and in the background a cute little mushroom cloud billowing into the dry Mojave air. Love affair or not, Southern Nevada and this nation’s atomic and nuclear programs are inextricably intertwined. Next time you’re in town, take time away from the course or the craps table and head over to the Atomic Testing Museum on the edge of the UNLV campus on East Flamingo Road. The interactive, multi-media journey through the history of America’s big boom weapons programs and the Nevada Test Site is compelling, enlightening, complete and, truth be told, more than a bit frightening and absurd when the strange bedfellows of national security and nonchalance — “When you see the big flash, kiddies, remember to ‘Duck and Cover” — are juxtaposed. The $10 entry fee is one of Las Vegas’ surest bets. www.atomictestingmuseum.org

Meet the (Cirque) Beatles

What is love? That’s easy. Easy? Sure, easy. Try what is LOVE? That’s tough, and it has nothing to do with a Clintonian examination of verb meaning. At the most obvious level, LOVE is the new Cirque du Soleil production at the Mirage, a marriage of Cirque’s trademark ubercircus-as-theater-art artistry and the exhaustive, image-laden playlist of the Beatles. And it is, well, it just is.

ike all Cirque productions, LOVE has a plot, a storyline, and if you are the type who found great joy divining layers of meaning in Joyce, you’ll have a ball. If you simply want to flap around in a warm pool of reminiscences, so be it. And if you land somewhere ’tween the two, you’re probably best served.

LOVE is less acrobatic than KA, Mystere and O, more so than Zumanity, and the most theatrical of the cadre of permanent Cirque shows in Vegas. Plenty of folks go flying around, but “core” Cirque fans must accept that this one is cast thick in symbolism for its own sake and interpretive dance, and some excellent dance at that. Perhaps because it was well nigh impossible to grow up in the ‘60s, ‘70s and even decades after without an understanding of the Beatles’ lyrics and the imagery infused through Sgt. Pepper, the White Album and company, LOVE is a Cirque production whose surreal stagecraft and costuming is easy to grasp — (light bulb) that’s Eleanor Rigby hauling around, literally, the amassed experiences of her fractured but unbroken life.

The show is crafted of several dozen vignettes that mesh across the threshold of time and mirror the development of the Beatles’ own world views as ultimately expressed through their music. At the tail end of the Baby Boom — I’m 45 — I never grasped until much later in life how the devastation of the World War II coupled with the continued dominance of the British class system so affected John, Paul, Ringo and George; LOVE puts it all on stage for every generation to grab.

LOVE is macabre, touching, jolting, funny.

LOVE is … well, I guess it’s all you need.