The huge screen on the Caesars Palace stage reveals a Nevada billboard bearing a poster of Bette Midler. She's posed in a cute blue dress with a short skirt that shows off her indestructibly fabulous gams; her smile is so electric it could light every casino on the Strip. A donkey wanders past, seemingly unimpressed, as, in the distance, a storm gathers strength. It morphs into a tornado, sending croupiers and chorines whizzing across the skyscape like Miss Gulch over Kansas. The door to an airborne Port-A-Potty swings open and an Elvis impersonator falls out. Now the video images give way to a crowd of real people on stage: three backup singers (the Staggering Harlettes) and 18 dancers. This is Vegas, baby. And riding in on that donkey, live and in person, all 5'1" of her, is the Divine Miss M. "Boy," she exclaims, in full twinkle, "is my ass tired!"
She will be by the end of "The Showgirl Must Go On," a 90-min. workout session that will play five times a week, 20 weeks a year. The other two headliners who will sport on the Coliseum stage when Bette's resting will be Elton John and Cher. "Me, Elton and Cher," she says of Caesar's year-round headliners, as a 1975 photo of the three flashes on the rear screen. "Does it get any gayer?"
Midler has come a long way since she was the gay guys' pin-up girl at the Continental Baths in Manhattan. She's 62 now, and her fans have matured with her. "Thirty years ago my audiences were on drugs," she confides. "Now they're on medication." Frequently she complains that she hasn't got the old energy. "Omigod I'm exhausted!" she apostrophizes after her very first number — adding, in response to certain pop-star lip-synchers who have played the Strip, "That's what happens when you do your own songs."
Bette's show follows the five-year run of Celine Dion's A New Day. That elephantine extravaganza, staged by ex-Cirque du Soleil director Franco Dragone, submerged the singer in gigantic sets and CGI effusions: rolling clouds, meteor showers, shooting stars. Midler jokes that she has come to "the only city that could teach Kraft about cheese" because of "the sh-tload of money they're payin' me." There's plenty of money lavished on the production too: $10 million (as she mentions three or four times during the evening), and it boasts some luscious videographic effects.
Oh, and Midler does make an appearance wreathed in a 3200-lb. headdress of pink feathers. But Showgirl, written by Eric Korngold and Bruce Vilanch, and choreographed by Toni Basil, keeps its focus on the star. It's a big satin pillow for her outsize talents to cuddle up in.
The songs, the nonstop snazz and of course the bawdry — or, as she puts it, "hits, glitz and tits."
Innuendo goes out the window when Miss M. comes to town. The clerk at the ticket desk offers the friendly warning that this is "adult entertainment," and inside you'll hear Midler caution the crowd, "Please don't call the Pope if you see a tit or two." You won't have to phone Rome; skinwise, the show is pretty chaste.
Bette relies on one of her longtime characters — Soph (for Sophie Tucker), the oldest babe in show business — to supply the raunch dressing. "My tits have fallen so far South they're speakin' Spanish," Soph confesses before telling a few ribald classics. (Cappers and rim- shots available upon written request.)
