Luxe Life Blog

Morning Call Exclusive: Scary Spice to headline Planet Hollywood’s new Peep Show; DWTS season one winner Kelly Monaco joins her!

Posted November 18, 2008 • 8:52 a.m.

Mel B with Baby Spice Emma Bunton.

Photo: Courtesy

Pop princess Scary Spice is set as one of the two new stars to headline the new topless adult cabaret revue Peep Show to open in March at Planet Hollywood, we have learned exclusively.

Melanie Brown of the Spice Girls will be joined by a sexy small-screen siren who will be named at noon today. Planet Hollywood founder Robert Earl will host a special press conference at the resort’s Strip House restaurant. Update at 1:30 p.m.: The sexy, small-screen siren joining Mel B at Peep Show is General Hospital star Kelly Monaco, who waltzed her way to winning season one of Dancing With the Stars with pro partner Alec Mazo.

The current Stomp Out Loud show will close -- and possibly relocate -- next month. The mezzanine theater at Planet Hollywood will then close and be redesigned and reconfigured into a more intimate setting for the lavish, multi-million-dollar adult show. It will come complete with close-up booths and banquet seats in a VIP front-stage lounge area.

BASE Entertainment co-CEO Scott Zeiger also is expected to announce at lunchtime today that his company has extended its agreement with Irish magician Keith Barry to return to the Planet Hollywood Peep Show theater in March. The hypno-magician (Click HERE for our recent exclusive interview with Keith) has enjoyed a highly successful five-week run at Planet Hollywood, which will culminate over Thanksgiving weekend with the filming -- over two nights -- of a new one-hour TV special. He has to fulfill prior tour dates in Britain and elsewhere in Europe for the first 65 days of 2009 -- and will then relocate to Vegas.

In addition, Zeiger will announce that he’s decided to temporarily close the resort-casino’s prestigious Theater for the Performing Arts after New Year’s -- and that, too, will undergo another multi-million-dollar modernized makeover. New supershows in a technological state-of-the-art complex will resume in early spring. “It is the largest, best theater in all of Vegas, and we want to be able to present perfectly supershows and spectacles that we have planned for the Strip,” he told me.

BASE has arrived in Vegas with a string of Strip successes: Phantom -- Las Vegas Spectacular and Wayne Brady’s Making It Up at The Venetian and Jersey Boys at the adjoining Palazzo.

The new Peep Show will feature up to 15 topless beauties -- more than any other cabaret revue on the Strip -- plus a five-piece band with two singers, along with Scary Spice and the to-be-named TV femme fatale. It is being directed by Tony Award-winning director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell, recently responsible for the smash stage hit Legally Blonde. He’s also a mentor on Bravo’s Step It Up and Dance and was Al Pacino’s personal pick as choreographer for the film Scent of a Woman.

Zeiger told me: “When this show launches, it will be the most expensive, most sexy and most theatrical adult cabaret revue ever put on in Vegas. In a sense, it’s a very modern and up-to-date version of what the old, intimate Vegas shows were all about. However, nobody will have ever seen anything like this one.”

Insiders tell me that BASE is investing $15 million in the production and another $15 million in the theater makeover to house it.

Melanie, an English pop singer-songwriter, is best-known in America as the outrageous leopard-print-dressed member of the Spice Girls -- and also for her successful run on Dancing With the Stars. My old pals on Fleet Street nicknamed her Scary Spice because of her outrageous, in-your-face personality and her voluminously curly hair.

She auditioned for the band Touch after answering an audition advertisement, and they were eventually discovered by Simon Cowell’s partner, music manager mogul Simon Fuller. He relaunched them as the Spice Girls with Geri Halliwell, Victoria Beckham, Emma Bunton and Melanie Chisholm. They had a huge run of hits starting in 1994, and in one two-year period sold more than 35 million albums. They’re one of the best-selling girl groups of all time, amassing more than 55 million records in sales worldwide.

The Spice Girls disbanded to pursue separate careers in 2001. However, Mel B did rejoin the group for its reunion tour, which played here at Mandalay Bay earlier this year during its fairly short three-month but highly successful world tour.

She hosted a number of British TV series, appeared in the movie Seat Filler with Destiny’s Child’s Kelly Rowland, wrote her autobiography Catch a Fire and performed in the Broadway smash Rent. Mel B now has a third solo album titled Reimagined to be released early next year, with the first single, “Who’s Is It,” due for release here before year’s end.

She and dance partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy, who created new choreography for Steve Wynn’s Le Reve, wound up in the finals of Dancing With the Stars’ fifth season. They were the highest-scoring couple of the season and, although they had a final dance routine score of three perfect 10s, they finished in the runner-up slot to Helio Castroneves and former Las Vegas Academy student Julianne Hough.

“She’s the perfect star to cast for this show. She’s a fabulous dancer, a great singer, has a unique sense of comedy and timing,” I was told. “More importantly, she’s always dreamed of playing the Vegas Strip, and this makes it all come true.”

Today when I meet her, I hope we can also learn about her somewhat slightly mysterious second marriage, which has been the subject of curious gossip and headlines the past year in Los Angeles.

In other overnight headline breaking news:

*A battle royal looks likely to erupt on the famed Strip this New Year’s Eve. In addition to Fox's 6 p.m. Dec. 31 special of super-stuntman Robbie Knievel taking a daredevil jump over the new Mirage volcano attraction -- which is scheduled to premiere at 4 p.m. Dec. 8 -- we’re hearing first news about an ESPN spectacular at the Paris.

Incredibly, word is that two jumps will be attempted: a motorcycle leap over the 65-foot-tall Eiffel Tower replica and a backwards truck flip over the Arc de Triomphe entrance archway. ESPN plans to cut away to the New York City ball drop in New York's Times Square in between the two stunts. Harrah's has confirmed that a contract for the stunts has been signed with ESPN.

It's something completely different -- and will certainly be highly dangerous . During ESPN’s live New Year No Limits telecast, action sports stars Robbie Maddison and Rhys Milllen will attempt the unique death-defying jumps at the Paris. Last New Year's Eve, the twosome took over The Rio’s parking lot for two wild and crazy stunts. Robbie, a freestyle motocross star from Australia, jumped the length of a football field to set a new motorcycle distance jumping world record, and Rhys , a New Zealand movie stunt driver, was to attempt the first-ever back flip of an off-road racing truck but sustained a fractured vertebrae during practice runs and postponed the caper until this year at the Paris.

*Mystery surrounds the sudden medical illness of King of Pop Michael Jackson. His lawyers have revealed in London this morning that he is too sick to travel to give evidence in a court case there. Doctors have sent the court official notices of the illness and said Michael is undergoing treatment.

Luxe Life and Vegas DeLuxe will develop both these breaking stories, so click back here later today for the full updates.

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