There aren't many singers alive whose voice is recognisable inside three notes, and two of them are working the same room at the Wynn this autumn. Encore Theater holds about 1,500 people, which is small for artists at this level: both of them sold records in numbers that would ordinarily put them in an arena. Here you get them close enough to watch them work. Which one you see comes down to when you're in town, so both are laid out below.
Diana Ross
Diana Ross spent the sixties singing lead on records that changed what a pop single could sound like, then spent the seventies proving she never needed the group to do it. The catalog is the reason to go. Stop! In the Name of Love and Baby Love from the Supremes years, then Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Upside Down, I'm Coming Out. Ninety minutes isn't much time for a body of work that size, so the set moves. She holds a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a sentence you can write about almost nobody in music, and she's still the one carrying the room rather than being carried by it. The run is three consecutive nights at the start of October and then it's over.
Diana Ross | Encore Theater, Wynn Las Vegas | Three nights, early October | 90 minutes | 12 and over
Lionel Richie - King of Hearts
King of Hearts is the rare residency where the audience does half the work. Richie writes songs people sing at each other rather than along to, which is how Hello and All Night Long and Stuck on You have outlasted four decades of changing taste, and why a room this size ends up louder than its capacity suggests. He came up through the Commodores before any of the solo records, took an Oscar for Say You Say Me, and has sold more than 125 million albums. On stage he's warm and unhurried and talks to the crowd like a man with time to spare, which in a theatre this small he actually has. His dates are spread through October and November, so there's far more chance of one falling inside your trip.
Lionel Richie - King of Hearts | Encore Theater, Wynn Las Vegas | Dates across October and November | 90 minutes | 12 and over
Check Lionel Richie availability
Which one fits your trip
For most visitors this isn't really a choice, it's a calendar lookup: Ross has three nights at the beginning of October, Richie has dates across two months, and your travel dates will usually decide it before you do. If both happen to fall inside your trip and you've only got one evening to spend, pick on mood. Ross is a career you've heard your whole life, performed by the woman who made it. Richie is a room full of strangers singing at each other, which is a different kind of good night out. There's a nice symmetry to the pair of them being here at all: we've written up the best Motown shows in Las Vegas and every act in that guide is a tribute, so for a few weeks this autumn you can see the source instead. For more of the era performed by the people who lived it, our guide to the Strip's long-running headliners covers who else is still at it.
