Vegas Magazine - Niche Media - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/242563
TOP: Spears performing at the 2011 Billboard Music Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. MIDDLE: At the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards in New York. BOTTOM: Accepting the award for best pop video at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards in LA. PHOTOGRAPHY BY MAX MORSE/GETTY IMAGES (GMA); ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES FOR ABC (BILLBOARD); FRANK MICELOTTA/IMAGEDIRECT (2001 VMAS); KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES (2011 VMAS) I first met 17-year-old Britney Spears backstage at New York City's Hammerstein Ballroom in 1999. I was a young Rolling Stone reporter and she was beginning the tour for her first studio album, …Baby One More Time. She was sweet, charming, and—surrounded by handlers—completely inaccessible. One year later, we met again when I had become the entertainment editor at Seventeen magazine. By then she was an even more unimaginably huge star, but as sweet and unassuming as ever, with the infectious confidence of a child performer whose every move was calculated by the grownups around her. When I left Rolling Stone for Seventeen, everyone thought I was crazy. But it was the best way to meet Britney: The 17-year-old reader follows the same stars, only without a trace of irony. Britney was loved. Almost 15 years later, Britney Spears—multiplatinum recording artist, fragrance tycoon, Madonna kisser, tabloid staple, mom, and now artist-inresidence at Planet Hollywood—still dazzles me with the energy and innocence of a high school cheerleader. Life for Britney is markedly different now. On a typical day, she drops off her two sons at school, heads over to a dance studio for five hours of rehearsal, picks up the kids, then drives home in time to cook dinner. "It's a grueling schedule," she admits. It might seem that taking on a two-year commitment to perform some 50 shows per year would add even more strain to an already packed schedule, but the singer imagines that life during her run of Britney: Piece of Me will be—as much as it can be for someone who has sold 100 million albums—rather ordinary. "I think I'll be able to live a normal life with my kids," Spears says from her home in Los Angeles with a tinge of optimism in her teenagersweet voice. "I will have some nights where I'll come back to LA after the show and some when I'll stay over in Las Vegas." One activity she'll be certain to squeeze in during those overnights: pampering. "They have the best spas in Las Vegas—oxygen facials at every one!" No doubt she'll earn those spa visits. For the 90-minute show, Caesars Entertainment has built a 4,600-seat venue that it's touting as the largest indoor immersive projection theater in the world. More than 60 projectors display images across a planetarium-like 280 degrees. A large dance floor has been placed in front of the stage and its runway, so Spears can highkick all the way into the crowd. VIP tables in front receive bottle service from waitresses in Britney costumes (red latex jumpsuits from the video for "Oops!…I Did It Again," Catholic schoolgirl uniforms with pig tails from "…Baby One More Time"), but there isn't a bad seat in the house. "We wanted to create a Vegas vibe, to encourage people to get up and dance," says Kurt Melien, vice president and head of entertainment for Caesars Entertainment. "This is not your father's theater." Spears's residency is part of a master plan by Caesars Entertainment to align itself with the tastes of today's Vegas visitors, whose average age fell from 50 in 2009 to 44.8 in 2012. For that youth movement you can thank the international obsession with EDM (for those above the mean, that's electronic dance music, which prevails in most local nightclubs), the upgraded restaurants and shopping venues, and the renewed emphasis on the nongaming activities that 20-somethings (and younger) arrive in droves to experience. "When we think of our portfolio of content, we look to mirror that demographic shift," says Melien. "You have plenty of fans who loved Britney in 1998 with '…Baby One More Time,' and there are people who loved her albums that followed. So you have a wide range, 078-083_V_FEAT_CS_BRITNEY_Winter14.indd 81 1/10/14 4:40 PM