7 Best Performing Arts in Las Vegas, Nevada

Defying easy categorization, this hybrid attraction is at once familiar and wholly original. The immersive theater concept combines tasting rooms, a speakeasy environment, and an up-close view of the type of acrobatics and burlesque popularized by Absinthe. While it is a working rum distillery (short tours can be part of the experience), it's also a fanciful environment, not to mention a ticketed show—or rather, a series of small ones.

A basic package lets you sample as many as four high-octane rums as you wander through the maze of an elegantly surreal warehouse decorated to the last inch with ornate, turn-of-the-20th-century trappings. The corridors lead to a circular main stage and three smaller performance areas. The venue suggests you just "get lost" and divvy up your two hours as you seem fit, watching a few burlesque numbers, magic shows, cabaret singers, dancers, and acrobats swirling off the ground on straps or hoops. Tasting stations let you use a punch card to sample the rum straight-up—no ice, but bottled water is offered in generous stacks. You can also buy bottled cocktails. (Sorry wine and beer buffs, there’s no conventional bar or bartenders.) Add-on tickets might include a 1920s “seance” layered on a spooky magic/mentalism show, while “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” is a 16-course tasting menu in a sit-down room themed after the titular novel.

Eccentric comic magicians Penn & Teller are more popular now than when they settled into the Rio in 2002. Ventures such as their durable TV magic contest Fool Us expanded the duo into mainstream culture beyond the Strip. Their magic in a gorgeous 1,500-seat theater remains topical and genuinely baffling, and their comedy is satiric, provocative, and thoughtful. The duo marked 30 years of Las Vegas performances in early 2023, all the more resonant because it was the 73-year-old Teller's return from a three-month break due to heart surgery.

Score one for the ladies: the Rio builds a theater dedicated to the men of Chippendales, surrounds it with a lounge and gift shop, and makes "girls night out" an identified (and coveted) Las Vegas target demographic. The show has fancier staging than any G-string revue traveling on the nightclub circuit, and the bow-tied hunks keep it respectable enough to let Mom tag along with the bachelorette party. Celebrity guest hosts such as Vinny Guadagnino from Jersey Shore join the fun at strategic times of the year.

Las Vegas's oldest community theater was hard-hit by pandemic closures but keeps on ticking. A main-stage season of six or more titles is sometimes augmented by smaller, more adventurous "Black Box" works, and there is usually a summer festival of "fringe" comedy or new works. Productions are staged in a sparse but comfortable theater in an increasingly crowded strip mall on the edge of Las Vegas's Chinatown.

The Palms' 2,500-capacity music hall has great sight lines in a clamshell layout and a stage big enough for big tours to squeeze in their arena staging. It has a flat floor for either general admission or reserved seating, and two decks of fixed seating. After some dormant years, the theater was running strong again with 2023 bookings ranging the musical gamut from Michael Bolton to Iggy Pop.

The Orleans Arena plays to locals with such family favorites as ice shows and touring children's productions.When it comes to concert acts, the 9,500-seat arena settles for the Strip arenas' hand-me-downs, but has much cheaper beer.

A superwide stage (originally designed to lure TV production) highlights this 800-seat room slightly west of the Strip, which draws a mix of locals and visitors. It hosts the type of headliners who play tribal casinos around the country: Air Supply, Three Dog Night, and Jeffrey Osborne among them.