Soul to Soul

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The following is special programming sponsored by Public Radio KUNV 91.5. The content of Soul to Soul does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

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ideas for a brighter tomorrow.

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This show is a free-for-all of positive

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energy that will include book

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discussions, music, politics, books, food, COVID-19, oral interviews, books, and Las Vegas history. Today our show is a show about Las Vegas history. I have with me Sue Kim Chung. Dr. Chung is a researcher who loves to talk to showgirls, dancers, and that's what we're going to talk about today for my Christmas show. Hi Sue Kim. Hi Clay T. So how did you get involved in doing entertainment, showgirls, dancers? Well, my official title is head of public services in Special Collections and Archives where I oversee reference instruction and outreach. But I also have curatorial responsibilities for women's history, LGBT history, and of course, my first friend, so my best friend in Las Vegas was a showgirl in Jubilee when I first moved here in 1999. I met her and she was just moving here from Paris where she had danced the Lido de Paris and she moved here to dance in Jubilee. So we met in 2000 and we've been friends for 21 years. shows through her and then I met her friends and then through my own work documenting the history of the shows and working with the Don Arden collection at Special Collections. That's probably how I got into the history of Showgirls. Wonderful. So just for clarification, what is the difference between a dancer and a showgirl? Yes, this is something that lay people find really difficult to understand. So we typically always say showgirl and they just assume anybody with ostrich feathers and rhinestones and sequins and fishnets is a showgirl. Well, there's a little bit of a difference. And particularly back in the 50s and 60s and 70s, there would be some dancers would be very particular about not wanting to be called a showgirl because dancers in that early period were professionally trained. Typically, they had professional classical ballet training. And so when they were in a show, they really were doing a lot of choreography and a lot of they were dancing, they were doing I always call that they did the heavy lifting in one of those big production shows. Whereas a showgirl, typically, she just wore a really beautiful costume that might have a really elaborate headdress. And she was very tall, had to be a certain prerequisite for height. And because of the costume and her role was just to kind of look beautiful on stage and just sort of walk around gracefully and stride around the stage. Later, they came up with a concept called nude, probably in the 70s, maybe, I think it might have started with Hallelujah Hollywood at the MGM Grand, I could be a little off, but I think that concept of the dancing nude meant that despite the fact that they were topless in the show, they were still doing dancing and so the dancer would do the most dancing, but they were typically covered. Dancing nude would be topless, but they were also doing dancing. And a showgirl had a role of just being beautiful and just gliding around the stage. And I believe that maybe the last real showgirls in that very strict definition of the word appeared in Hallelujah Hollywood. And then after that, like a show like Jubilee, they were called dancing nudes. But again, it's a difficult concept for laypeople to understand. So typically, if you say showgirl, you know, that's people what people think. They wore ostrich feathers and headdresses and fishnet tights. And so, right. So how do we find this topic? You are a librarian who does wonderful research. You help professors on campus, students. So how do you find the topic of showgirls, dancers, sitting into the university classroom? Well, it's certainly a part of Las Vegas entertainment history. You could also say that it's part of Las Vegas history writ large, so women's history. It is dancers and dancing nudes and showgirls, they all were part of, you know, they were able to work and have careers at a time in the 1950s when, you know, the labor market for women might have been not as large and the capacity for the positions that were available for women. So you could make a good salary. You could, you know, buy your own home, albeit, maybe you might have, I have a, I interviewed a dancer who's now in her 90s, and in 1955, she had to have a male dancer by her house, and then quit claiming to her. So she couldn't even buy her own house, even though she could afford to. So it was a profession that women could have a success and, you know, make a good living at. And yeah, that's wonderful. And that was not the only occupation where women could not buy a house.

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It was just the way of the world.

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And it's just so I wanted to say that it's part of Las Vegas history. And then you could also extend it out to sort of labor history. And there's just different, different. And it just is something that you could study as part of and and then if you're also into entertainment history, and the history of the spectacular as something that has appeared on Las Vegas stages, French stages, New York stages as well. So there's all different ways to to look at this history. Wonderful. So tell me about one of our fascinating shows here in Las Vegas. Talk about one of the shows and maybe one of the dancers from that show. Well I never saw this show, but I have read so much about it and I have seen so many pictures and I have known performers in the show Hallelujah Hollywood, which was a show designed by Don Arden the great producer impresario of the spectacle in Las Vegas and Paris and it was the opening show at the original MGM Grand, which is now Bally's. And I believe it opened, the hotel opened in 73. And I believe, Hallelujah Hollywood opened the following spring in 1974. And it was quite spectacular in terms of, you know, a living curtain of people of, at the time they had animals that performed in that show, I believe lions. So it was, you know, this MGM, this spectacle of movies. So there was, and there were different, it was the first line of African American dancers. The Ebony line was included in that show. Wonderful dancers like Laverne Lagon, who was the dance captain for the Ebony line. the Ebony line. Oh, so many fabulous dancers in that show and dancing nudes. And certainly, I think one of the principles in that show is the very beautiful Trisha Lee, Trisha Lee Lee Boobie Chee. And you know, you see that I've heard legendary stories about Trisha and her grace and her beauty on stage and people still talk about it. And that show in 1980, right before the opening of Jubilee. Jubilee was supposed to open in December of 1980. And of course, there was the MGM fire in late November of 1980. So Jubilee opened in July of 1981. But Trisha was the beautiful one of the beautiful principals in that in that show in Hallelujah, Hollywood, and we have so many pictures of her on gracing the stage. And she happened to be the daughter-in-law of the famous Madam Bluebell, who was the person who was responsible for selecting all the beautiful dancers and dancing nudes for the shows. She was a work hand in glove with Don Arden. So, Trisha is certainly somebody I think of when I think of the epitome of Las Vegas dancers and showgirls. And so we didn't talk about this, but tell me about the Bluebells. The Bluebells were the line of dancers in a typical Don Arden spectacle. They were dressed dancers, which meant they were covered dancers. They were not topless. And then they were dancers, so they worked hard. They did the majority of the choreography, and they were the sort of main line, and they had a line captain, and they were the ones that did the majority of the dancing, but again, they were covered. And there were bluebells all across the world. There were bluebells, of course, at the Lido de Paris in Paris. There were bluebells in the Lido de Paris show at the Stardust. Any show that Don Arden put on and he worked in collaboration with Madame Bluebell, there were Bluebell dancers. And they were we have a fabulous collection and special collections. We have the Margaret Kelly scrapbooks of all her clippings of all the Bluebells around the world that did shows. And it's a fabulous collection. So this makes me I'm excited just listening to you talk about it. So if I'm just a regular person here in Las Vegas, can I come into special collections and see these items that you're talking about? You certainly can. There's the fabulous Don Arden papers, there's the Margaret Kelly scrapbook, there's the Tom Hanson collection on Jubilee, there's the Fluff LeCoultre papers. Fluff was a longtime company manager of Jubilee and then she was also a dancer herself. Oh gosh, there's so many collections. But we also have material that is online and has been digitized. The Dawn Arden Collection has been digitized and can be found online at our portal, special.library.unlv.edu. And you can see costume designs. You can see production notes. You can see musical arrangements, invoices for feathers from Paris and just so many wonderful things and programs and photographs. So much of this history is online and available through our portal, but we do have additional things you can visit in person in special collections in our reading room.

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So did you see any of these shows?

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I saw Jubilee because by the time and Folies-Bergeres, by the time I moved here in 1999, there were just the two of the big production show spectaculars, which were Jubilee and Fully Brugere, Jubilee at the Bally's and then Fully Brugere at the Tropicana. And so I saw both of those multiple times. And, you know, I'm so glad I did because it's really, you know, it is wonderful that we have all this documentation on the history of the shows, but there really was nothing like actually seeing those beautiful girls come down the staircase in the costumes designed for the finale by Bob Mackie And it's kind of no substitute for that beautiful kind of piece of Las Vegas history. So is there a place now for that scenery that you just described, the dancers and showgirls, along with Cirque du Soleil? Can we do both? Oh, do you think that there is still a place? I think that there are a lot of people that would really obviously all the performers who performed for many decades in these shows would certainly love to see these shows back and if anything can be judged from the sort of reception they get on Facebook. But I think there's room. I think there is, I mean, there still wouldn't be, I mean, the women who are on the strip walking around are not real showgirls, not real dancers, as far as I know. But, you know, the fact that they are out there and that the former mayor had, you know, showgirls as his sort of signature, iconic thing that he would use to bring with him to different multiple events shows you that the showgirl is a sort of symbolic creature, iconic, you know, associated with Las Vegas. And so sadly she has no home, but I think people would people probably miss that spectacle and maybe it needs to be a little updated, but I think it would be something that people would like to see there because when you come to Las Vegas and you want to see it. People say I want to see a showgirl show and it's so sad because there are no shows anymore. Yes, because I would love to see one again as well. So with that question, what is the future? Is CIRC do so late yet? Or is there another what is the next iteration? Gosh. Well, I still think Cirque will be popular for a while. And, you know, at one time, there were multiple showgirl shows, just like there were multiple Cirque shows. You know, in the 1960s, you had Casino de Paris at the Dunes, you had Lido de Paris at the Stardust, you had the Folies Rougere at the Tropicana, you had at the Desert Inn, you had Hello America or Pizzazz. And you had, later on, you had the Moulin Rouge at the Hilton, now the Westgate. You had City Lights, you had Razzle Dazzle, you had these shows that were sort of show girls shows, but ice shows. So there were just so many shows. And so just the way we think that there are so many Cirque shows. Maybe there'll be a resurgence and it'll be sort of a different iteration, but they will include these beautiful dancers in, you know, feathered headdresses and fishnets and sequins, and there'll be a different way of presenting it. So I mean, I think I don't I don't feel like it might not be able to do it on the scale, the spectacle scale that they did in the past, because the money may not be there. And maybe the talent is I don't know, is the talent there to to do these shows? We don't have a Don Arden anymore. We have, you know, Jerry Jackson is retired. So who do we have that? But I think that maybe there's the talent out there and and it just needs to be a little bit different. Maybe there will be something that will come up but still utilize the dancers.

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I love that. A few minutes ago, you talked about costume designs. Tell us about that. Tell us about a good story about one of the designers or about costuming.

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How is that done? Well, we are very fortunate in special collections and archives. That is something that we collect extensively to document the shows. They're quite lovely to look at. A lot of documentation in special collections is very strictly textual, and it's to help people really write history. And so the costume designs are historical as well, but sometimes they're just also beautiful and fun to look at. And we have the work of designers like Bob Mackey, who designed for Hollywood and for Jubilee. And so he worked for Don Arden, and we have the work of Pete Menethy, who worked for Don Arden. Artin. And one of the more recent, we have the work of Fulco, who designed for the Lido de Paris shows in Paris. And one of the more recent collections we've acquired through a combination of donation and purchase is the work of Bill Campbell, who designed things for the Ice Capade shows, but also for a number of Don Artin shows, such as Hello America and Pizzazz in the 1960s, and Hello Hollywood Hello, which was the big spectacle show in Reno. These are quite fabulous, and they're also they have all the information on them about the fabric. So they'll have the beautiful design, and they will have fabric swatches attached to them, and they will have notations about what type of fabric and how much and what type of trim to use. And we'll have, we often have sort of rough sketches and finished sketches, which were the finished sketches were the things that were presented to the producers of the show to kind of explain what they wanted to accomplish with the show and how and to present the idea to the producers. And one collection that has fabulous designs and is the Jerry Jackson papers. And Jerry And Terry Jackson was kind of the production show impresario who was design genius behind the Folies-Bergeres for 35 years from about 1975 to when the show closed in 2009. And his collections, he not only did the choreography, he wrote lyrics, he wrote music, he did costume design. and he so his collection you can really see document the creative process because you see rough sketches that he might have done on a small piece of paper, then you see the next stage and then you see with all the notations about which material should go here and there and then you see the finished sketch which he would show to the kind of financers and the production team to get there. So did you get to interview him? Yes, I got to interview him. And I did actually want to focus, I did ask him a lot of questions about his creative procedure and his creative, excuse me, his creative process and how he, you know, if he was doing a number that involved like it was going to be set in, you know, France in the 18th century, he would do historical research, or if he was going to have a show set in Imperial Russia, he would do a lot of research so that he could incorporate that historical knowledge into the costume designs. And so that was kind of fascinating to see how he would bring together the historical research, the costume designs, the set for the show, etc., how he was going to design each number. And so how did you get that collection? As a layperson, tell us what you do to bring in a collection like that. Well, with Jerry, it was actually almost like a seven year process of staying, of contacting him and letting him know what we did at Special Collections and Archives. And at that time, the show was still going. It was still appearing at the Tropicana nightly. And so Jerry was not really ready to kind of give up his records, because they were something that he used for the for the show. And to kind of, you know, he they were still working his working archive for the show. But I kept in touch with him usually year over year. And, you know, I brought him he came once to like, look at the show and freshen it up and I brought him to the university and I brought him to the reading room to show him what we we had collected about Don Arden and he brought some of his designs in and then you know year after year I would send him a Christmas card and stay in contact with him so that when the show finally closed in 2009 he was ready to go and he was like okay I'm gonna work on organizing this and so in two different trips to Los Angeles, I went to his home in West Hollywood and picked up the collection and brought it back to UNLV and it's just a fabulous, every archive should have a donor who is so well organized and so gracious to actually have everything. As an archivist, you know, you spend a lot of your time, if you get a collection, organizing it and determining how to arrange it so that it can be best used by researchers, but so that there wouldn't be a lot of guessing. Jerry actually organized a lot of his materials by show and by country and by hotel. And it's pretty fabulous. Most donors don't go to that length of trouble. So it's a fabulous collection. It also has been pretty much completely digitized and, again, available on that Special Collections portal at special.library.unlv.edu. Wonderful. So you also have a series that you do here in the city. It's a series of discussions where the community is invited in. Tell us about that. It is called Fishnets and Spotlights and it's a panel series on entertainment history at the Clark County Library. It's typically twice a year we were derailed as everyone was by COVID. So we had this past year and the summer we had our first panel for over a year. And this was about the celebrating the 40th anniversary of the premiere of Jubilee in July of 1981. And so we had Tricia Lebowici and Janet Spellman, who were both original principals in Jubilee when it opened. And we had Diana Eden, who was an assistant to costume designer Bob Mackey. And they discussed the previous incarnation of the show when it was set to open in December. And then after the fire and their experiences with the fire. And Diana was actually in the hotel itself the morning it caught fire. And so we talked about that, and then we talked about the opening and the whole process of remaking the costumes after the costumes were destroyed by not only the fire, but the smoke and the water damage from the firefighters. So we discussed that, and that was a really rich discussion. But because Jubilee then went on to run for 35 years, we're having a second panel in February that will kind of focus on other years, of the many other years of the show and the performers who were in the show over the years. And so other shows we've had focused on the Showboys. We focused on the Casino de Paris, the Frederick Apkar show at the Dunes. We did two series of that. We've done two series on two panels on specialty acts, the jugglers, the contortionists, the trapeze artists that have appeared in the different shows. And in May, we are having a panel on the great choreographer Ron Lewis, who was a choreographer for Casino de Paris at the Dunes and also Vive les Girls, many, many other shows. And also he choreographed for Liza Minnelli on Broadway, was typically known as, you know, a very demanding choreographer. And so I'm excited that I will have people talking about his amazing work. And that'll be in May. Okay, so the first the next one, though, is in February. Yes. What is the ideal panel for that one? It is people who have appeared in Jubilee over a period of at some point during the 35 year run of the show. Do you have any yeses yet? I'm working on that. So many people have appeared in the show because it was a very large cast. It did go down in terms of the number of people. But so there are many people to choose from. So that's the trick is finding just four people. So a lot of people, a lot of dancers and showgirls still live in Las Vegas? Oh gosh, yeah.

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Oh, wonderful.

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For sure. And you know, sometimes people even come in from out of town. I had for one of my showboy panels, somebody came in from LA to appear on it. But you know, some showgirls maybe did one contract and maybe they went back to England or they went back to Paris or maybe Australia. But a lot of the dancers, they moved here and they said, oh, we're just going to do one contract and 50 years later, they're still here. So. Oh, that's wonderful. I love I love your topic. I love what you do with it. Any other comments that you'd like to make to the public? Just any comments at all? Well, it's always nice if you if have you if you were a dancer Or if you were somebody with he was a performer involved on the strip, you know And you have some materials you feel like gee my kids aren't interested you know just know that we would Love to be take a look at them for the archives because they're just such an important part of documenting Las Vegas entertainment history Okay, I'm glad you threw that in so so Kim personally So, Sue Kim, personally, with what you do and all of the creative things that you're

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involved in, what are your intentions for the new year?

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Well, I have my two panels and I would love to do an actual writing project on Showgirls. So I would love for that to be sort of an intention that I take one of these sort of public panels and maybe I could do something that could evolve into an article or maybe one day a book about Because people just love to read about Las Vegas entertainment history people have such connections and and memories with the history of Las Vegas entertainment because maybe they've come here and they they saw a show in the 1960s and that was their first time and they had such an amazing remembrance and memory, the nostalgia of that show. So I think there's an audience for it, and I just love for people to appreciate it. I think people do, and I think that would be a bestseller. So any personal New Year's resolutions, intentions for the year? Maybe I should walk my dogs more. I guess I would just like to do more creative work. And that includes writing projects with coworkers, collaborative projects, and more creative work is basically what I'd like to do. I think that's going to happen. So this has been Soul to Soul, our last episode of the year. You may hear it every fourth Sunday morning at 830. So please join us. This is a show that is a free for all of positive energy. It includes book discussions and music, politics, books, food, COVID-19, Las Vegas history, and of course, books. Thank you so much. Bye bye. Thank you.

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Thanks, Sue Kim.

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So, let's get started. So, let's get started. Thanks for watching!

Transcribed with Cockatoo