Plug Pulled on “iLuminate” at Strat
A dance show featuring customized LED suits, “iLuminate,” is closing at Strat.
The show has run for four years, but the plot-light production’s final curtain happens May 31, 2025. We know this because the show’s ticket availability stops abruptly on that date. This isn’t rocket science.
Presumably, the show will now have a national and international tour “with hopes of returning to Las Vegas in the future.” Whenever we put quotation marks around something, it’s because we’re pretty sure the things in quotation marks are never happening but a performer might accidentally read our blog and we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings unless they are David Copperfield, BFF of noted creeper and currently blistering-like-a-ginger-sunbathing-at-a-Vegas-pool-in-August dead guy Jeffrey Epstein.
“iLuminate” was one of those Las Vegas shows that quietly plugs along, getting good reviews but flying under the radar. Four years a reasonably good run, but successful shows don’t close in Las Vegas. It’s the law.
The show’s tagline was “iLuminate: The Most Fun You’ll Ever Have in the Dark.” Which sort of set people up for disappointment because sex still exists. Not for us, but other people.
The bottom line: It’s dancing with LED suits.
Here’s the hype video.
Can we dance like that? No.
Is dancing entertainment? Sort of?
Visual shows, without a lot of plot to follow, have been a staple of Las Vegas entertainment, mainly because back in the day we used to get more foreign visitors whose first language wasn’t English. Even Cirque, whose success was built on that formula, has struggled mightily following the pandemic.
As we have not seen “iLuminate,” we have run out of thoughts to fluff this story up, so here are some words from the show itself: “Founded by dancer and software engineer Miral Kotb, ‘iLuminate’ boasts customized LED suits with wireless lighting programs that create extraordinary lighting effects that move along with each of the phenomenally choreographed dance moves. The original blend of dance and technology previously landed ‘iLuminate’ in a finalist spot on ‘America’s Got Talent’ and now all of Las Vegas can see the show in action. The dance group has delighted fans around the world and has been seen on hit television shows including ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ ‘The X-Factor,’ ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show,’ to name a few. The dancers and technology were also seen alongside artists including The Black Eyed Peas, Chris Brown and Christina Aguilera on programs such as The American Music Awards, MTV’s Video Music Awards and BET Awards, in addition to tour dates around the world.”
You remember Chris Brown. If he ever releases a “Greatest Hits” album, the liner notes will be court transcripts.
Anyway, we would really like one of those “iLuminate” LED suits if there’s a garage sale following the closure of the show at Strat.
Wearable tech and electroluminescent wire is the future. Fun fact: You’ll never, ever guess the name of our band in high school.
There’s still time to see “iLuminate,” tickets start at $54, with VIP tickets up to $119. There’s a lovely “convenience fee” of $12, of course, and the live entertainment tax ($5.94 for the $54 tickets). So, $72 all-in for the cheap seats, not bad.
Life has gotten challenging for mid-tier shows on The Strip. (Yes, Strat is on The Strip. Don’t get us started.)
A slew of theaters have shuttered, leaving such shows with fewer options. In four-wall deals, the show pays rent to the hotel and has to do its own marketing. In the parlance of the industry, it ain’t easy.
Strat has a partnership with production company SPI Entertainment to bring productions to the hotel’s showroom. We have absolutely loved a couple of the shows that bailed from Strat, including “Banachek’s Mind Games” and “Xavier Mortimer.”
The company is moving ventriloquist Terry Fator into the “iLuminate” slot once the show moves on.
The theater is also host to “Rouge,” a revue of some sort. Yes, we saw it. No, we are not sure whether to recommend it. It was confusing. “Rouge” has a mixture of men and women, uncommon for Las Vegas revues. The heterosexual male brain doesn’t really know how to process it. Porn often has men and women in it, and that’s a thing. Maybe it was the “fantasy sequence” where people dressed up like horses? Sometimes, we put quotation marks around things because we’re being sarcastic. People should not be having fantasies about horses. The closest comparison is probably “Zumanity,” the most confusing Cirque show, and one of the most closed.
“Rouge” was created by Hanoch Rosenn. He is also the person behind “Wow” at Rio and the former “Extravaganza” at Bally’s (now Horseshoe). “Extravaganza” was also weird. These shows feel like something strange happened in translation.
Hanoch Rosenn was once a mime, as were we, so we have to cut him some slack. It’s the mime code.
We had a award-worthy role in this mime-themed production.
Anyway, “iLuminate” is closing at Strat.
We don’t know what to think about Strat anymore. They fired a great G.M., Steve Thayer, who is now at Palms and single-handedly ended a bitter Twitter feud between us and Palms that started because their social media person refused to use sentence case. The Palms Twitter account is still weak (most casinos fall into the trap of treating social like advertising, which it is not), but at least now it doesn’t look like the resort’s social marketing is being done by an emo middle schooler.
Strat is owned by Golden Entertainment.
We haven’t visited the casino since they started charging for parking, although, we did hit Atomic Golf, which is adjacent to Strat.
It’s probably obvious by now we don’t know how to end this story. We asked ChatGPT for a suggestion: “We’d wrap this up with a clever zinger, but we’re too busy refreshing Twitter to see who stole our work today.”
ChatGPT just gets us.
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