Paris Underground came about because the venue offered him the opportunity of an eight week season. “Usually you do a show and there’s all the work and build-up,” notes Vegas. “You do two or three performances and it’s all over. With the opportunity of an eight week run, we can make the show bigger, use more space and raise the bar in terms of quality and what we have to offer.”
Vegas is thrilled with the calibre and breadth of the show he’s put together with life partner and co-performer, Julia Mendotti. “Normally I don’t get to do a long ensemble piece,” he says. “I don’t get to create that ensemble feel.” Vegas describes Paris Underground as something like a traditional European variety show with cabaret, circus, burlesque, song, dance and theatre, a tradition of performance more familiar to audiences in Paris and Berlin than here. “It’s a very popular form of entertainment in Europe. We’re not going down the road of doing just one genre. We created an umbrella for the night for different things. We were looking at how we can do something a bit off beat, a bit dark,” he adds. Where do the bits of darkness come into it? “The start to Act II gets serious when it goes down to the catacombs,” Vegas answers.”People have been lost and died down there. If your battery goes flat, you’re dead.” He hastens to add, however, that Paris Underground is ‘straight-up entertainment.’ “It’s not one of those ‘journeys’, not something you have to sign up for…there’s a little bit of an undercut of the Paris underground scene, obviously not of something you’d see at Moulin Rouge or Lido. We undermine the variety genre as well as upholding it, and also do it with a big sense of humour. It’s highly theatrical, but not that new a concept for people who’ve seen this sort of thing before.”
Vegas reckons there’s a healthy dose of Aussie piss-taking involved in the show. “That’s why we called it Paris Underground. The French take themselves seriously, they’re very proud of themselves so we have a dig at Parisian culture.” Vegas is full of enthusiasm for the talent he’s gathered together for Paris Underground. The show includes, along with Vegas taking the role of host MC maestro Monsieur Marvaux and doing his magician’s turn, hand-picked performers such as Madotti, one of Australia’s few female magicians and illusionists, stage and screen actor Nick Simpson-Deeks, another fellow NIDA graduate who Vegas calls a ‘triple talent’. “He has the most amazing voice,” he notes. “We have circus artiste and aerial ‘angel’ Hannah Trott, who’s still at NICA, burlesque artist and international showgirl Zelia Rose, who has an amazing ability and presence on stage, the powerhouse singing of Aurora Kurth, and ‘tap king’ Eden Read, who’s a teacher and an amazing performer.” The weirder elements of the show come courtesy of Betty Blood and Pippy Scream, the kinky and twisted sisters of ‘neo-burlesque’.
Having so many different performers involved supports the development of the show in terms of an external perspective, something Vegas is grateful for. “It’s good to have an ensemble of people whose judgement you can trust, an outside ‘eye’ to help with choreography, help form the sensibility of the piece. It’s hard to perform and direct. Even with Julia, we spend a lot of time on stage together. Having all those eyes, having other people, it’s like when you have a great director, they can highlight things you never would have discovered.”
It’s not often magic shows get an extended run, notes Vegas. “You don’t see magic performed as often as you’d expect. I’ve performed at the casino and I do corporate gigs but usually it’s one or two nights somewhere or at private functions. I used to have a residency in Sydney but I haven’t been able to secure a residency in Melbourne.”
Vegas went to NIDA to study conventional acting so how did he end up being a magician? “Julia got me into magic,” he explains. “She pushed me into it. She was performing herself and got me coming along to night clubs. I would sit there thinking, ‘if I’m here, I might as well get paid’.” Performing magic is infinitely more nerve-wracking than acting, Vegas says. “I have never been as nervous as when I was performing magic fo the first time. You think people can see what you’re doing. You need so much confidence. That’s why magicians need so much fake bravado. People are merciless, they’ll yell out ‘Don’t give up your day job.’ This is my day job!”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
