For more than 25 years, Fantasy: The Strip’s Sexiest Tease has been the Luxor’s late-night love letter to the Las Vegas showgirl. This year, the show is making the love letter official.
On May 21, the show’s cast was to present the National Day Archives proclamation for National Showgirl Day to the Nevada State Museum. The 10 a.m. ceremony coincided with the unveiling of a refreshed showgirl exhibit at the museum, featuring costumes and images that trace the rhinestone-studded history of one of the city’s most iconic art forms. National Showgirl Day itself falls on May 24.
It’s a fitting handoff. The classic Las Vegas showgirl—6 feet tall in headdress, feathers from shoulder to floor, half a chandelier strapped to her back—is largely a museum piece these days. But the spirit of those productions is very much alive on Strip stages.
That’s what the adults-only show has been doing inside the Atrium Showroom at Luxor since 1999—six dancers, a powerhouse vocalist as emcee, a comedian and a rotating set of themed numbers that incorporate high-energy choreography, aerial acts, solo performances and burlesque. The “Sexiest Tease” tag is just, well, a tease. The show offers so much more.
Photo by: Bryan Steffy
What truly sets Fantasy: The Strip’s Sexiest Tease apart from your run-of-the-mill revue is the production values—and the woman behind them. Emmy-winning choreographer and producer Anita Mann created the show in 1999 and has shepherded it ever since, a hands-on tenure almost unheard of in a town where producers come and go. Mann’s résumé runs from network television variety specials to Las Vegas spectaculars, and her signature is all over this show: the couture-level costumes, the live vocals, the choreography that asks its dancers to train like athletes. There’s a reason it has outlasted nearly every other adult revue to ever open on the Strip. Somebody figured out a long time ago that sexy works better when it’s also smart, polished and a little bit funny—and that somebody was Mann.
The connection to the showgirl tradition isn’t accidental, either. This production’s lineage runs straight back to the spectaculars of Stardust, Tropicana and Bally’s—productions like Lido de Paris, Folies Bergère and Jubilee!, where ostrich plumes met live orchestras and women commanded the stage with the gravity of headliners. Fantasy: The Strip’s Sexiest Tease is the keeper of that flame.
That’s worth a museum exhibit. It’s also worth a proclamation. National Showgirl Day didn’t exist until last year, when Mann herself petitioned the National Day Archives to put it on the calendar, choosing May 24 to mark the 1955 opening of the Moulin Rouge, the first integrated hotel-casino in Las Vegas and a foundational moment in showgirl history. Her show presenting that proclamation to the Nevada State Museum is a full-circle moment.
So drop by the museum, see the new costumes and feel the weight of history in all its plumed glory. Then, if you’re so inclined, head to Luxor and watch what that history looks like today.
The feathers may have gotten smaller, but the art form is doing just fine.
Luxor, 18+. 18+. 702.262.4400. luxor.mgmresorts.com
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