Rather than hire out entertainment for his Wynncore showroom (the one not occupied by Le Reve), Steve Wynn has taken a DIY approach. He’s producing and co-writing Showstoppers, a revue of some of the most iconic songs from Broadway musicals. It’ll 
cost a tiny fraction ($10 million) of the budget of a Cirque du Soleil show and the anti-Cirque approach was part of the attraction, according to Wynn himself. “We can’t just surrender to Cirque du Soleil. How many shows can you stand of that stuff. Jumping, popping, swinging. I mean, enough already,” said the man who brought Cirque to the Las Vegas Strip. Besides, creative personnel include choreographer Marguerite Derricks, a Zumanity veteran. Randal Keith, the best King Arthur I’ve seen in Spamalot, will topline the show. The 28 dancers outnumber the original A Chorus Line‘s 18.
Showstoppers may not have have the whimsical grotesquerie of Cirque but it won’t lack for production values. It will have a cast of 34 and a lavish orchestra of 30. “We’ve got to do our own thing here,” Wynn said, dismissing long-running rumors that Spider-Man, Turn off the Dark would land at Wynncore. (He did snare Spider-Man director William Philip McKinley, though.) “If you hire stars, they get all the money,” he added, suggesting that perhaps he’d soured on the arrangement that brought Garth Brooks to the Strip. Wynn knows how to cater to millennials but Showstoppers is unabashedly for Baby Boomers. We’ll see if enough of them plunk down the $90/seat ticket price. Performances begin Dec. 16. Then we’ll get the verdict on “the most personal project I’ve worked on in my whole life.”
* When Steve Beshear (D) was elected governor of Kentucky, in 2008, on a pro-gambling platform, Columbia Sussex jumped the gun and purchased the Bavarian 
Brewing Co. building in Covington, derelict since 2006. Fast-forward to 2014 and Beshear still hasn’t been able to get casino gambling through the Bluegrass State’s Legislature, leaving ColSux CEO William J. Yung with something of a white elephant on his hands, one he’d like to tear down, his sale price having proven excessive. Although the brewery is on the National Register of Historic Places, that can’t save it from demolition. Local grass-roots activists are trying to gin up a protest in the face of a do-or-die Urban Design Review Board meeting on Nov. 17. But they concede that outrage at Yung is waning and they need to rally public support. As for ColSux, it would replace the brewery with “high-rise condominiums, retail outlets, parking structures” — but no casino anymore. (The company has gotten out of the gambling business following a series of catastrophic setbacks.)
* While Horseshoe Baltimore continues to lead gambling revenues in Maryland
upward, it’s only delivered a glancing blow to Maryland Live, off 3% last month. 
Even a 10% dip in September was less than projected. Having sampled Horseshoe, Maryland Live patrons appear to be reverting to familiar habits. (Horseshoe revenues, in their first two months, are holding rock-steady.) Caesars Entertainment executives say they have made “incremental week-over-week gains” in terms of converting Baltimore Ravens to Horseshoe fans. October was a good month for Rocky Gap Casino, where revenue grew by 11% but not so good for Penn National Gaming‘s forlorn Hollywood Casino Perryville, where it dropped 11%.
* Caesars Bucharest? It may never happen and certainly not while tax rates in the country hover at 25%. Romania‘s parliament is mulling tax reductions, poker rakes of a tenth of a percent and the extension of licenses from five to 10 years. (Casinos have been legal in Romania but no international operator has applied for one.) Don’t get your hopes up: Comparable reforms were proposed last year but went nowhere.
* Phil Ivey will appeal the ruling of a London court that he cheated while playing at a Genting Group casino.
