If there is anything most entertainers master, it’s how to juggle gigs. In New York City, they may have sidelines in real estate or hospitality. In Las Vegas, their day jobs are, well, also in entertainment.
“That’s the beautiful thing about Vegas — you’re going to find people who do everything,” said Katie Marie Jones, a busy local actress who also works as a magician’s assistant on the Vegas Strip and an on-ice host at the home games of the Golden Knights hockey team. “If you have multiple wants and talents, or if you’re open to learning new things, it’s easy building a career here because there’s so much.”
This town has been world-famous as an entertainment destination for decades, and it keeps evolving. These days the Strip hosts Cirque du Soleil spectacles and comedians, razzmatazz magicians and pop residencies. Visitors can also attend Spiegelworld’s immersive “Discoshow” and an interactive installation by the art-tainment group Meow Wolf at Area15, which is dedicated to immersive projects. Major touring musicals stop off at the Smith Center, and three major-league professional sports teams have moved in relatively recently.
What’s a lot harder to find is theater on a smaller scale, an assembly of midsize institutions that would add up to the equivalent of Off Broadway.
A homegrown professional scene does in fact exist in Las Vegas, except visitors tend not to know it because the Strip sucks up all the attention. It’s scrappy, sure, with its rock ’n’ roll energy but the theater makers here are especially resourceful and don’t fit in boxes. Over a long weekend late last fall, a few things became clear: there’s a palpable hunger to make theater against the odds, the locals who can keep it viable are ready for it and the artists enjoy the freedom of straddling aesthetic and artistic worlds.
To find those shows, you could go, for example, just over a mile west of Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip’s drag, to the suite of office and rehearsal spaces where I saw a performance of A Public Fit’s terrific production of “The Minutes,” Tracy Letts’s pitch-black comedy. Or you can head roughly a mile north of the Strip to Majestic Repertory Theater, where Jones is currently in “Cabaret” playing that wily hustler Sally Bowles — “she would kill in Vegas,” Jones said appreciatively.
And that’s two-thirds of the scene. Another outfit, Vegas Theater Company, sits a seven-minute walk from Majestic in the 18b Las Vegas Arts District (so-called because it originally encompassed 18 blocks), and feels like a compact version of Austin, Texas, before its tech boom.
Any way you look at it, three is not very much company for a metropolitan area of about three million people.
“Growing up here, watching the city grow and evolve, I kind of assumed that the culture would evolve in a way similar to other big cities that I had known — Los Angeles and Chicago and New York,” said Joseph D. Kucan, 59, the producing director at A Public Fit. “And it just didn’t.”
Maggie Plaster, a Nevada Ballet Theater board member and director of parks, recreation and cultural affairs for the city of Las Vegas, said in a phone interview that she “didn’t really know that we had local theater until I became part of the cultural affairs team three years ago.” (The Arts District falls under the city’s purview. The Strip is in an unincorporated part of Clark County, which has jurisdiction over it.)
When asked why local theater has struggled to take off, Plaster mentioned rising rents, the marketing “noise” of big shows obscuring smaller companies’ efforts, and the lack of deep-pocketed donors.
“We’ve been doing this for 12 years, and it’s been incredibly hard,” said Ann-Marie Pereth, 54, A Public Fit’s artistic director. “Philanthropy in this city is not the same as it is in other cities.”
She and Kucan have become masters at working out partnerships with other companies (they did a production of Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa” at Vegas Theater Company last year) and local governments (like semi-staged readings at the Clark County library).
Another missing element is an institution that could act as a magnet. The city lacks a local member of the nationwide League of Resident Theaters — which includes nonprofits like Actors Theater of Louisville, the Alley Theater in Houston, the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles and Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. A Las Vegas institution in that network could forge closer relations with peers, create bonds for potential commissions and co-productions, and generally have a better chance at national exposure.
But two ambitious projects could drastically change things in the near future: The Vegas Theater Company executive artistic director, Daz Weller, 46, is working on a new performing-arts complex in the Arts District that would house his own company, Vegas City Opera, and possibly other groups. Then there’s the Huntridge Theater, an imposing building that started as a movie palace in 1944, shuttered in 2004 and is scheduled to reopen, after an extensive renovation, in the second quarter of 2026. It could fill the middle ground between the Smith Center and the Strip on one hand and the Off Off Strip companies on the other.
The project is led by the Nevada developer J Dapper, of Dapper Companies, who bought the Huntridge in 2021, and Darren Lee Cole, the producing artistic director of New York City’s SoHo Playhouse, who will operate its multiple stages. The idea, Cole explained in a phone interview, is that the complex will play a role similar to that of Off Broadway in New York, and host both imports and Las Vegas-grown productions, major playwrights and newcomers, along with pop and rock concerts.
Of the need for such a place, he said: “People are coming from New York, from Chicago, from St. Louis, from Los Angeles in particular, San Francisco, and all of these new residents have a foundation of culture that is more inclusive than seeing the shows on the Strip and maybe going to a Broadway show at the Smith Center.”
Cole is in talks with an array of potential partners, including the three main pro Vegas companies. Troy Heard, Majestic’s artistic director, is especially optimistic. “Not only for its historic significance in our city, but it’s a rebirth for our area — a new anchor facility.”
Until the deck is reshuffled one way or another, the hardy locals continue to make theater with can-do ingenuity and resourcefulness. “You don’t have culture vultures overlooking everything you do,” Heard, 49, said approvingly. “There is a sense of the Wild West here, a sense of experimentation.”
He is behind his own homegrown success story: “Scream’d: An Unauthorized Musical Parody.”
When the post-pandemic doldrums befell Majestic, Heard threw what he described as a Hail Mary pass to save the company, which he had founded in 2016. He wrote a spoof of the 1996 horror-comedy movie “Scream” that featured a jukebox full of 1990s hits and staged it with a rambunctious, goofy spirit in a cabaret setting. (The versatile Jones took on the Drew Barrymore and Rose McGowan roles.)
It opened in September 2023 and when a clip went viral on TikTok, the house filled to overflowing with both locals and traveling fans — the night I caught “Scream’d,” I met a couple of 20-something sisters who had just driven eight hours from Monterey, Calif., to see it. The Majestic plans to run the show in a residency this year, and a Los Angeles production at the Whitley is slated for May.
A gamble that paid off sounds like a happy Vegas ending, a simile Heard is probably fine with — this Georgia transplant admires the city and its idiosyncratic culture. “The Strip is a cruise ship right in the middle of the desert, and there’s this interesting community of creatives and artists and visionaries who do come to work on the Strip but then have this life outside of it,” he said. Of course, Heard picks up freelance jobs as well: He’s piloting the forthcoming “John Wick Experience” at Area15.
Weller is just as ecumenical. By necessity but also, one senses, by inclination.
After working as an actor in his native Australia, Weller moved to Las Vegas in 2010 to reunite with his boyfriend (now husband), Toby Allen, whose vocal group, Human Nature, appeared on the Strip. Once in town, Weller continued to act but also built up his directing résumé, which included a stint as associate director on Spiegelworld’s “Vegas Nocturne” in 2013.
Since 2018, Weller has been the artistic director of Vegas Theater Company (né Cockroach Theater). Last year’s productions included a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog” as well as the premieres of the saucy “CLUElesque” (now “ClueX”) and the coming-of-age musical “The House on Watch Hill,” which will return this year.
That one was conceived by Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor (whose “Bandstand” had a Broadway run in 2017), and typically they, too, are busy on the Strip — Oberacker is the longtime conductor for Cirque du Soleil’s flagship show, “Kà,” while Taylor played the violin in Adele’s band during her residency. Both men enjoy going back and forth between giant and tiny productions.
Versatility Is Key
Oberacker pointed out that the creative opportunities are also bolstered by a formidable calendar of trade shows, product launches and corporate happenings. “If you are an improv artist, if you are a clown, you can find your way to having employment in really cool, weird avenues because of the nature of the industry out here in events,” he said. After the performance of “Scream’d” I attended, the live band’s mono-named drummer, Anisa, told me she could make “10 times more a night” playing a corporate gig or a trade show.
Adaptability extends to the way the theater companies organize themselves. After losing its big downtown space, A Public Fit, which focuses largely on contemporary plays (it’s presenting Sam Shepard’s “True West” this spring), became semi-itinerant. At Vegas Theater Company, Weller — who is paid on a project basis — is particularly skillful at juggling new and old material, rentals and house-generated projects, regular runs and weekly events.
Among the latter is “The Marquis de Sade Presents: Abandon,” Robert Bullwinkel, Abel Horwitz and Jana Wimer’s wordless after-hours show proudly flying the adult flag that is very much part of the more sulfurous Vegas tradition. The inventive production stars agile performers with Blue Man Group and Cirque du Soleil credits, and benefits from stunning audio work by Joseph Bishara, the “Conjuring” and “Insidious” composer, and the sound designer Katie Halliday, an Emmy Award winner for “Stranger Things.”
While perpetually scrounging is hard, as Pereth said, the Vegas theater scene also has access to a wild pool of talent and displays an indisputable D.I.Y. energy, even in a more traditional production like A Public Fit’s “The Minutes,” which she directed with Kucan.
Back at “Scream’d” at Majestic, my attention drifted toward a young audience member decked out in steampunk-goth finery who seemed to intensely live the show’s every second. It was a repeat visit for Julia Osier, 17, a Las Vegan who wants to study lighting design and had come with her best friend, who was herself interested in pursuing stage management. “We go everywhere but we tend to like the storytelling theater, anything from this to Shakespeare,” Osier said. “We’ll see anything.”
Ideally, the Las Vegas theater scene can give them not just the chance to see anything, but also the chance to create anything.
