Everybody still wants Vegas showgirls and Elvis.
- katzdan3
- Apr 27
- 15 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Cari Byers
Premier Showgirls, Las Vegas, NV
I’m a retired showgirl. I was a showgirl on The Strip in Folies Bergère for 12 years until it closed. Before that, I’d always been a dancer. I danced in ballet companies, modern companies. I have a degree in dance from Arizona State. I danced overseas in a small cabaret show and then I got the gig in Folies and moved to Vegas.
I’m from Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was very fortunate to get really good training; there were a lot of very well known professional people from Albuquerque that would come and give workshops. One of the dancers I was fortunate to work with was a very well-known choreographer in L.A., worked with Juliet Prowse and Raquel Welch and he retired and moved back and took over a ballet company, and I worked with him in that company. He kind of steered me in the Las Vegas direction because of my height. Most New York dancers and dancers in L.A. aren’t six feet tall.
There’s two things that you have to have to be a showgirl. One is the height. It depends on the show, some cut it off at 5’9” and some are stricter at 5’10” and over. So they’re tall girls. And they really, really want you to have some dance training and be a strong dancer. To be a showgirl, especially when I came to town, you had to be tall.
For the longest time, I wanted to be a ballerina. In high school, I was 5’10” and one of the teachers I was training with told me, “I don’t think ballet is going to be your thing, you’re too tall.” He said, “If you were soloist or principal quality, you might be able to make it, but you’re not.” Then after that conversation, I started looking around to figure out what I wanted to do. Of course, I still wanted to be a dancer. So I kind of set my goals on being a Rockette and New York and that kind of thing, but then I grew more… and that was out of the picture.
I don’t even remember when I decided that this is what I’m going to do, I just never wanted to do anything else. My dance teacher was like, “Well, then if this is what you want to do, you need to be well-versed. You need to learn how to tumble, you need to take tap class, you need to take ballet, take jazz, take all the things.” By that point, I had put in so many years and had my heart set on doing this, that it was like, “Well, let me figure this out.” I loved jazz class just as much as I loved ballet at that point. Just make it work. There’s so many things you can do.
At the time, I had danced in Japan and I had come back and I was living in Arizona because I had connections there and a boyfriend there… I could sleep on someone’s couch until I figured out the next step. I was getting The Dirt Alert, which they don’t even have anymore. It was a newspaper based in Vegas with all the auditions, who’s casting what, agencies would advertise in that. I would come out here for auditions; I had auditioned for Siegfried and Roy and was too tall for that, and then they posted the showgirl audition for Folies and I came out and did that and I got the job so they moved me out here.
There’s videos of Jubilee and Folies on YouTube, so you can get a sense of what they were, because there’s no huge production shows anymore. The Folies always did well and when the recession hit, the marketing department did some very smart things. They started doing dinner and a show, huge discounts, they reduced the ticket price… we never really had a problem with the audience. There’s times of year which are notoriously horrible, it just is what it is. There’s a couple of tradeshows in town and it is notoriously dead in showrooms during those tradeshows. I think Vegas had started the trend toward four-walling theaters, which means that the hotel/casino rents out the space. They’re renting out the space and there’s always money coming in from that space because the production company or whoever is paying rent. So that trend had started, and the Trop got new owners and they didn’t like the show. When they decided to shut the show down, it was at a slow time of year, so they tried to say, “Ticket sales are bad.” And we’re like, “Well, go back to last year and for ten years — this is what it is at this time of year because of this tradeshow.” They just thought they could make more money and four-wall the theater.
The casinos had brought in those shows — Lido de Paris; Jubilee; Hello, Hollywood; Folies —to bring people in and they gave away tickets to high rollers, left and right, to bring the high rollers into the casino and make them feel special. They didn’t care if they lost money on those shows because they were big spectacular things that the casino could say, “Look what we have, we have Lido de Paris,” and the high rollers would come and they’d take them backstage. It was a big thing. It was probably a huge tax write-off if they could show how much they’d lost on the show! It was a very different time.
I was very fortunate when I worked for Folies — and it’s not like this anymore — the shows at the time were owned and produced by the casinos, so we were casino employees. We had benefits and a 401(k) and all the things. It’s not like that anymore. A lot of the small independent shows, they’re not set up like that. You don’t get a 401(k) and health insurance and paid vacation, all the things that we did at Folies. It’s a very different landscape now, the entertainment in this town.
It’s definitely a sports town now, and it’s a headliner town. We’ve always had headliners, but the headliners would play the lounge. They weren’t getting rid of the shows for the headliners. People who come here to see basketball or football or hockey won’t buy tickets to see showgirls. It’s a different demographic. Formula One, those people aren’t buying tickets to shows. It has to do with a couple different things, I think. I talked to one of the guys that runs those ticket kiosks on The Strip, and this was a couple years ago. People used to come to town — and this is the entertainment capital of the world — and say they have their budget of $500 to spend on entertainment. Well, in 2009, for $500 you could see Folies, you could see Jubilee, you could see a magic show, you could see a couple afternoon shows. Now, you have $500, you buy one ticket to Lady Gaga and there’s your $500. Or one hockey ticket. So he’s like, “My revenue’s not down. But I’m not selling six different things, I’m selling one thing.” It’s a huge transition.
I think a lot of shows are trying to figure out their path. A lot of the casinos have shut down their smaller shows, their afternoon shows. It doesn’t make any sense because if you’re four-walling, why not have something in there? Folies closed in 2009 and Jubilee closed in 2016, and that was the last, that was the end of casino-run production shows. That was the last production show. For 50, 60 years, it was a staple of Vegas and every large casino had their big production show. I’m glad I got in at the tail end and I got to do it for ten, twelve years.
The best stories are always people falling on stage in big costumes, those are always the funniest. We’ve all fallen on stage. You just get up and keep going, unless you’re hurt. There were a couple people at Folies that fell all the time. We danced on this mirrored staircase and I don’t even know how high it was. The stairs were narrow and they were mirrored, and you can’t look down because you have this massive headpiece on, so if you look down, it falls down and it drags you down. So you can’t look down and there’s 50 people coming down the stairs behind you and there’s 25 people in front of you and there’s people on the getaways that are coming up the stairs… It happened all the time. You just learned to step over people. There was a rule, and they tell you this in your first rehearsal: if you go down, you go down alone. Don’t drag anybody down, don’t grab on to anybody. Because if you grab on to the people next to you, that’s really dominoes.
We had these big chiffon-y, yards and yards of pleated gold lame, I think. It was one of our finale costumes, and this was the whole cast for finale. In Folies, we had two lines of boys and four lines of girls: acros, short dancers, tall dancers, and then the showgirls. We were pretty close to the front and one of the girls got tangled on the getaways coming up, she got tangled up in her wings and ended up in a ball, kind of sitting, kind of laying on a step of the getaways, while the entire cast is trying to go around her because she’s just so wrapped up in all this fabric and heels and hat. And she’s dying laughing and we’re all trying not to die laughing.
One of my falls — the finale of our show was, at this point, the can-can and it was these massive Victorian dresses with huge trains and petticoats, massive wigs with huge hats. That was probably our heaviest costume. This friend of mine, we were interacting with all the boys and he put his hand on my chest and kind of pushed me backwards, just being funny. But as he did that, I was stepping on my train and my petticoats and I was going down, down, down, in slow motion. I got so tangled up in my dress and my train and my petticoats that I had to crawl offstage because I couldn’t stand up, I was so tangled up. The stagehands were no help because they were laughing so hard at me that they couldn’t help me untangle myself and help me get back onstage. It’s so funny, we’re in these glamorous fancy costumes, and splat. It’s the cherry on top. Then you hear the audience… if it’s one of those time when you can see the audience, the audience goes, “[gasp!]” in unison if they see. We were doing 12 shows a week and there’s 100 people in the show so I’d say at least once a week somebody fell.
The show closed in 2009 and I was there for that. I bounced around for another five six years, I freelanced for a long time as talent. I tried the office job and the sit-down job and that just didn’t work. I started working for a bunch of different agencies, and I started working for Premier Showgirls.
The woman who owned Premier Showgirls at the time was a magician’s assistant. Her husband was a magician. So I started working for her and then I started repairing her costumes because I had done some work-study at ASU in the costume shop, so I knew how to sew and build costumes. I just kept working for her and I kind of graduated to when she would go on tour for the magic show with her husband, she would leave me in charge. I would tell her, “I want to buy your company and please let me know if you ever want to sell it,” and she was like, “Oh no, I would never sell Premier Showgirls, it’s my baby.” I pestered her for probably a good couple years and then I was like, “She’s not going to do it,” and I gave up… and then she did.
A friend of mine was directing and mounting a funny parody show downtown and I had done the costumes for that show, because there were some showgirls and some fun stuff in that. I went to the red carpet and I took my two best friends who were of course dancers and we’re at the bar afterwards having drinks and my one friend is like, “So, if you had a million dollars, what would you do?” I said, “Well, if I had a million dollars, I’d buy the house next door and Bill — that’s my husband — and I can live like Freida and Diego. Then I’d buy a talent agency and hire you to run it.” And I’m not kidding, the very next day, the woman that owned Premier Showgirls called me and said, “Do you want to buy the company?” By that time, I’d given up on her because I’d been hounding her for years and she was like, “No, no, no, I’ll never sell it.” She was still working with her husband and they had bought a theater outside of Dollywood and they weren’t coming back here. I think she started it in 2000 and 2014 was when I took it over. I pulled money out of my 401(k) and jumped off into the deep end. Scary, because I’d never been on this side, other than managing an event here and there for her.
I knew the industry and I’d been here working in it for so long, that I knew so many people. I had a lot of good clients that would come to me and say, “I need you to be in our booth.” I knew a lot of people and I knew a lot of talent, and I said, “I can make this work, I could really grow this company.” Nothing against the woman that owned the company, but this wasn’t her first job. She did love it and she put time into it, but she didn’t put 80 hours a week into it because her husband had the show and she worked on that. I had the time to spend all my time doing it. I know the industry, let’s see if I can make this side work.
So many of my clients now are corporate and do tradeshows, that I have to be… I can’t be traditional. I have to be more corporate friendly, covered. The standard showgirl is very scantily clad, but with lots of jewels and feathers and huge headpieces and the backpacks — it’s like a backpack but it’s feathers. You have the headpieces, and then some costumes have the backpacks. And those can be super heavy, too.
In the shows, probably the heaviest costumes are between 35 and 50 pounds. And you’re in three-inch heels. That’s why you have to be six feet tall, because all of these costumes are massive and if you put it on a girl that’s 5’5”, it just doesn’t look the same. It swallows her up. Of course my costumes that the girls wear for hours on end are not that heavy and they’re not that big and cumbersome because out at a tradeshow, they can’t navigate the six-foot wingspan of some of those hats and backpacks. They’re considerably reduced in size and weight for what I do, because those [heavy] costumes are designed to be worn for three minutes, not three hours.
I was just having this conversation with another one of the girls who works for me a lot — the tall girls aren’t coming here anymore. There’s not a show for them to go into. Maybe New York… but there’s not a whole lot of tall girls. This used to be the place to come. If you were a tall dancer, you could dance up and down The Strip your whole career. I used to be really strict about using girls that were 5’9” and taller but if you’re 5’7” or 5’8” and you look tall and you’re available… I’ve had to lower my height requirements because the girls are retiring and leaving town and getting out of the business after a while. You age out. That’s the nature of the beast in this industry. I used to be a real stickler about, “I’m sorry, you’re not tall enough,” but… necessity.
There’s a couple other companies that specialize in showgirls. There’s some of them that haven’t been as much of a stickler on the height requirement as I have, so they’re probably not even noticing the shift. But I tried to be very true to the showgirl tradition and hire the tall girls.
This is such a different industry, and the entertainment industry here is very different from L.A., New York. I don’t think there are agencies that do what I do, say, in New York or L.A. You can go to a talent agency but a talent agency’s not necessarily going to have the costumes and the props and the this and the that. You come to me, I have the costumes and the props and all the things. I’m a talent agency, yeah. Because you’re booking talent but the benefit of booking talent here in Vegas is that usually if you book showgirls, they come with their showgirl costumes. You don’t have to book the models from here and then rent the showgirl costumes from a costume rental house. I think that’s how it works in L.A. and probably New York. I think that’s unique to Las Vegas, that’s how we work.
I had a concept for a show, probably now almost ten years ago. When I took over this company, I was like, this can be the stairway to producing a show. So I had conceived the show, BurlesQ, and I casted it and mounted a couple times it to get photos and videos because my original goal was to travel to all the casinos in Arizona and New Mexico and California because they have little cabaret burlesque shows that they do.
During the pandemic, though, one of my past clients had a friend who had the small showroom at the Alexis Park Resort and had been producing comedy shows and stuff. But during the pandemic, he convinced them to lease him their large ballroom, and he built a COVID-compliant showroom with 25 feet between the audience and the performers, tables of four six feet apart. He was talking to this client of mine and he was like, “I’d really love a female revue or a burlesque show or something,” and my client was like “I know someone who has one.” By this point it had probably been four or five years since I had originally conceived and tried to sell that show and I was like, “I don’t know if I can do it,” because at that point a lot of talent had moved out of town and a lot of talent had taken full time jobs doing other things because there was no entertainment industry, there was nothing.
My client convinced me to do it and I went to meet Pete, who would go on to be my producing partner, on December 8th, we started rehearsals on the 10th, and we opened the 18th of December. It was bananas. I called my friend, the one who asked me what I would do with a million bucks, and I was like, “I can’t do this.” And she was like, “Are you insane? Yes, you can! We can do this.” I was like, “I don’t have a cast.” And she was like “Shut up, we can do this.” She choreographed three new numbers for me and we started rehearsals and we rehearsed after hours because they had a show in the theater and it was selling out because it was the only show in town. Set theaters couldn’t be complaint to the COVID laws and regulations because they’d have to tear out the whole showroom and start over. So no shows were open.
But this guy was a genius, he was like, “I can build a COVID-complaint showroom in a ballroom.” He originally said “Let’s do five shows,” and then we ran for three years. It was really fun. It was a lot of work and a lot of stress. At one point we were the only female revue in town. Battling the sports and the marketing costs of the bigger shows… once they came back, we didn’t have the budget to compete with them. We had a three year run with over 500 shows and it was just time to move on.
Right now, I think I’m just running it as-is to see where we’re going. When I took over the company, I really wanted it to grow and I had all these plans and dreams of how it would grow. I wanted to do more dancing, performance things. I got to do that and I produced my show and that ran for almost three years. I think having had the show and reaching that goal and being successful… it also ran while times were changing. So I got a whole different perspective on show business in this town and I think maybe that had made me a little bit wary. I’m just going to sit back and ride the flow and see what happens.
Since the pandemic, it’s been very different here. There used to be a very definite convention/tradeshow season and I could count on those months being busy and good. But when the pandemic hit and all those tradeshows cancelled and reschedules, they rescheduled all throughout the year. It’s never gone back to this set, “these months are tradeshow season.” It’s kind of shifting back that way, but I don’t know if it’ll ever go back to the way it was before the pandemic. We lost some really big shows, we lost the rodeo. They moved elsewhere. The convention areas kept hiking their rates and raising their rates and I think that’s why we lost some shows. Like, Ski Show moved, that was a huge show. I think it went to Colorado, which makes sense. We used to have huge bridal shows that happened a couple times a year; those aren’t happening anymore. We have smaller ones, but it’s not what it used to be. It was a huge fashion show thing that they’d have in the Folies theater at the Tropicana twice a year. Huge production fashion show, twice a year. Now it’s much smaller.
But we’re still popping out the weddings. I work weddings all the time; it’s so Vegas. I did two weddings this weekend, showgirls and Elvis at a wedding. I had two girls on Friday night and they came out with Elvis, Elvis sang a few songs and did pictures. I’ve done everything from showgirls walking the groom down the aisle while Elvis officiates, to actually dancing. I had one wedding they were the witnesses for the wedding, and sometimes they’re just there for the reception. It’s super fun. I have more weddings this month. The girls love to be in weddings. You just show up, put on your costume and smile.
It’s classic Vegas, but there’s nothing up and down The Strip like that anymore. But everybody still wants Vegas showgirls and Elvis, from weddings and birthday parties to tradeshows.
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