Count the eras in this one. A band playing soft rock from 1978, in a room decorated as a Prohibition speakeasy from 1923, reached by a concealed elevator above an ice bar, inside a hotel pretending to be sixteenth-century Venice. Nothing about it should work. It works completely, and it's one of the more purely enjoyable 75 minutes on the Strip.
The band, and why they're better than the genre suggests
The Yacht Rock Experience featuring the Docksiders is led by Kevin Sucher, a three-time Grammy nominee, which is a considerably heavier pedigree than a soft-rock tribute act needs. That shows up in the playing. The material is Hall and Oates, Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, Olivia Newton-John, and it's performed straight rather than winked at, which is the difference between a tribute show and a novelty. There are costume changes and the band encourages captain's hats and nautical dress, so a popped collar reads as participation rather than a mistake. One specially made cocktail comes with the ticket, which quietly changes the arithmetic of an evening at the Venetian.
Yacht Rock Experience feat. Docksiders | 1923 Live, The Venetian | 75 minutes | 21 and over | One cocktail included
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The room is half the ticket
1923 Live sits above the Minus5 ICEBAR in the Grand Canal Shoppes, and you reach it by an elevator most people walk past without noticing. Inside it's bourbon-forward Prohibition styling, low light and plush seating, with the Venetian's gondoliers drifting past outside. It's the second location of the 1923 Prohibition Bar, whose original room sits under Mandalay Bay at the other end of the Strip and hosts the seance-style Ghost Stories, so if you enjoy this one there's a companion evening waiting four miles south. The ice bar downstairs is covered in our Minus5 guide, and doing both in one night is a perfectly reasonable plan.
Who it's for
Anyone who wants a show that asks nothing of them. It's an hour and a quarter, it's a bar rather than a theater, nobody's dragging you on stage, and the material is deliberately warm. It works particularly well as the second thing you do in an evening, when a full production would be too much. It's a poor fit if you want spectacle, or if you'd rather hear original songs than covers played properly. For the bigger tribute productions, our roundup of the best pop tribute shows in Las Vegas covers the theatre-scale end.
