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Vegas Showgirls
In late Nineteenth-Century Paris, nightclub entertainers — the original showgirls — famously performed the cancan dance, a moment in time since immortalized in colorful story and in the art of Toulouse Lautrec, among others. Theaters and dance halls like the Moulin Rouge, the Lido, and the Folies Bergere became famed worldwide for their increasingly elaborate production shows featuring talented and alluring showgirls, dancers, acrobats, and singers.
In 1907, Florenz Ziegfeld introduced the Parisian showgirl archetype to the United States, as part of the original Ziegfeld Follies revue. The spectacular choreography and colorful costumes of Ziegfeld’s show soon caught the attention of a maturing Hollywood film industry and celluloid versions of showgirl production numbers became the centerpieces of elaborately staged and lushly filmed Busby Berkeley movies of the 1930s.
Meanwhile, a young Irish dancer at the Folies Bergere, Margaret Kelly Leibovici, created a dance troupe called the Bluebell Girls in 1932. Jailed and interrogated by the Gestapo during World War II, she soon after met and started a fruitful collaboration with Donn Arden, an American choreographer and producer, running a very successful show at the Lido, in Paris. This was really the advent of the modern showgirl, featuring very tall, elegant women in sparkling costumes. The Bluebell concept was so successful that franchises spun off worldwide during the late 1940s, including in Las Vegas, Nevada.
By the 1950s, Las Vegas casinos were battling for preeminence in what was becoming
an increasingly popular and competitive adult playground. The late Bugsy Siegel’s vision of Las Vegas as a mecca for gamblers and vacationers had come to full fruition. Each casino vied for position in every way they could, including in the quality of headliners that they boasted and in the spectacle of their production shows, many of which centered around the classic showgirl image that soon became at least as associated with Las Vegas as with Paris. Huge headdresses and jeweled accessories became de riguer and some of the costumes were extremely heavy or otherwise difficult to bear; the routines and physical demands of the job were very strenuous and physically hazardous and showgirls and other performers in these shows were carefully selected to adhere to rigorous standards.
Some of these shows were extremely long-running by Las Vegas standards; Folies Bergere, at the Tropicana, ran for 49 years and Lido de Paris, at the Stardust, ran for 34 years before being replaced with Enter The Night, that ran for a further seven years. Jubilee — like the shows in both Paris and Vegas locations of Lido, conceived and opened by Donn Arden — was the last full-scale showgirl production show on the Las Vegas Strip, closing its doors after 35 years in 2016. Real Las Vegas showgirls will always be an exclusive group of extremely talented and hardy performers and their legacy will live on in perpetuity, forever inextricably bound with the rise of Las Vegas and its golden age as the entertainment capital of the world.
By the 1950s, Las Vegas casinos were battling for preeminence in what was becoming
an increasingly popular and competitive adult playground. The late Bugsy Siegel’s vision of Las Vegas as a mecca for gamblers and vacationers had come to full fruition. Each casino vied for position in every way they could, including in the quality of headliners that they boasted and in the spectacle of their production shows, many of which centered around the classic showgirl image that soon became at least as associated with Las Vegas as with Paris. Huge headdresses and jeweled accessories became de riguer and some of the costumes were extremely heavy or otherwise difficult to bear; the routines and physical demands of the job were very strenuous and physically hazardous and showgirls and other performers in these shows were carefully selected to adhere to rigorous standards.
Some of these shows were extremely long-running by Las Vegas standards; Folies Bergere, at the Tropicana, ran for 49 years and Lido de Paris, at the Stardust, ran for 34 years before being replaced with Enter The Night, that ran for a further seven years. Jubilee — like the shows in both Paris and Vegas locations of Lido, conceived and opened by Donn Arden — was the last full-scale showgirl production show on the Las Vegas Strip, closing its doors after 35 years in 2016. Real Las Vegas showgirls will always be an exclusive group of extremely talented and hardy performers and their legacy will live on in perpetuity, forever inextricably bound with the rise of Las Vegas and its golden age as the entertainment capital of the world.
