In the never-ending effort to bring an ever-greater spectacle to the Las Vegas Strip, Wynn Las Vegas is the latest resort to raise the bar. Today it announced a new show, awakeningwhich opens on November 7.
The production will not only feature narration by Anthony Hopkins, but also awakening – featuring a creative team that includes multiple Emmy and Tony Award winners – will also be presented in a custom theater in the round with a 60-foot stage with 80-foot ceilings. The resort describes that podium as “prismatic,” thanks to the fact that it’s made of dichroic glass and LED screens.
“The show was supposed to be on a Las Vegas scale – bigger and more exaggerated,” Baz Halpintells the director of the show and a producer The Hollywood Reporter. He explains that thanks to the design of the 360-degree theater, “As a spectator you are really immersed in the action in the truest sense of the word. It is 1,600 seats, with the farthest seat from the stage being 75 feet. Everything is open and everything is in sight.” The stage, he adds, “is made of the most complex shapes. It is shaped like a nautilus and is divided into eight separate parts that all go up and down and rotate. It’s built all of glass, which, you know, building a stage out of glass is insane. And then our set designer, George Tsypin, built a custom invisible LED screen that sits in the center of the stage, allowing us to really viscerally represent these specific five worlds in which the show takes place.
The show was conceived and created by three talents. Halpin has worked on everything from the Emmy Awards (as production designer) and American Music Awards (executive producer) to halftime Super Bowl shows (Katy Perry) and concert tours (Taylor Swift). The producer of the show Bernie Youman is known for managing Muhammad Ali and Las Vegas icons Siegfried & Roy, and he produced the Gloria and Emilio Estefan musical On your feet. The show’s third producer and the production’s character creator is Emmy Award-winning designer Michael Curry, who has created puppets for everything from the opening ceremony of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics to Broadway’s The lionking.
“Michael can do things that no one else can: bring inanimate objects to life, which is nothing short of a miracle,” says Yuman of Curry’s talents. Yuman adds that the overall aim of the show is to bring “wonder and spectacle into the 21st century”.
Expect puppet-like characters built on a grand scale, woven into a story about a heroine named Io who embarks on adventures with two fellow travelers “while seeking to restore beauty and love to the world,” as detailed in a release from Wynn Resorts (which recently launched a $200 million redesign of all 2,700 rooms and suites in Wynn Las Vegas). The resort has also released a trailer for the show.
awakening will also feature an original music score by Emmy-nominated composer Brian Tyler. It will be heard through a proprietary 3D sound system the resort calls WynnSonic, featuring PHBX technology, which was conceived by the producers in collaboration with Tony Award-winning sound designer Peter Hylenski. “Bernie, Michael and I started prototyping a concept for a sound system that never existed. My assignment to Peter was, ‘I want to feel that the body of the sound – that the chorus – was a velvet blanket and that I was wrapped in it,'” Halpin recalls.
The show will also feature over 300 costumes for a cast of 60, all designed by Emmy-winning costume designer Soyon An (So you think you can dance).
“State of the art lighting, sound and stage technology, coupled with intricate storytelling, glamorous costumes and large-scale puppetry will awakening and the awakening theater stands out as a true innovation in theatrical entertainment and once again raises the bar for Las Vegas,” said Craig Billings, CEO of Wynn Resorts in a statement.
Elisabeth Caren/Courtesy of Wynn Resorts
“This is really immersive in the truest sense of the word because it’s a 360-degree theater,” says Curry, adding that the LED elements built into the stage can be used to create visual experiences that vary from “giving viewers the impression of being submerged underwater to floating in a world in the clouds.”
Halpin also promises that there are at least three “illusion techniques” incorporated into the show “that have never been seen before in the history of the performance of illusions.” However, he declined to give details, as he wanted to keep the element of surprise for the public.
The show is entering a fiercely competitive Vegas live performance market, including the highly profitable music residency space (which will see Adele comes to the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in November.) It also comes at a time when Las Vegas is still luring tourists and convention attendees back to pre-COVID levels. Last August, the number of visitors reached almost 3.2 million, an increase of 6.4 percent from the previous year, but still a decrease of 10.9 percent from the number of tourists in August 2019.