Luxe Life Blog

Ellen’s super huge circus spectacular features Hans Klok’s return to the Strip

Posted November 21, 2008 • 12:01 p.m.

Ellen DeGeneres amid the "Even Bigger Really Big Show" cast.

Photo: Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabik.com

Ellen DeGeneres pulled off an international coup thanks to the Overseas Airline Guide’s timetable to fly her variety show guests from throughout the globe into Las Vegas. Without knowing it, she also brought about an unexpected magical reunion for her headline act -- and Vegas DeLuxe got the exclusive!

Photographers were given just 90 seconds to shoot the lineup of circus acts that appeared last night at the end of the show with Ellen. She’d premiered her “Even Bigger Really Big Show” in the Colosseum at Caesars Palace to kick off the fourth annual Comedy Festival.

(Click HERE for our excellent editor John Katsilometes’ review of the show posted this morning.)

With stops, starts, mic problems and band audio problems, the 44 minutes of show time (commercials will round it out to 60) took more than 90 minutes to shoot as a taped TV special for airing on TBS this Sunday night. The giant teleprompter screen lost track of where the script was supposed to be racing up and down. Even Ellen admitted from the stage: “I am totally confused as to where we are.”

Before the circus acts got underway, there was an exhausting 30-minute-plus warm-up session of applause! After you’ve watched the brilliant two-minute video opening of the bellmen, statues and table dealers all following Ellen in Pied Piper fashion, don’t go looking for them at Caesars!

They were all professional entertainers from the League of Extraordinary Dancers hired for one very long 12- to14-hour day of shooting all over the resort’s casino and convention areas just the day before Ellen’s show. Their entrance into the live taped production was spectacular as the lead-in to Ellen’s arrival on stage. The daytime talk show hostess also played a video of her stint across the Strip at the Legends in Concert show at Imperial Palace.

It all left about 30 minutes for the acts from around the world: brother-sister act Roberto and Cinthia Laurino from Argentina; Pasha Pliona from Russia with a one-man double dance act; Eric Saintonge with his amazing hoop from Eastern Europe; the brilliant Korean acrobats from Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere at Treasure island; incredible Spanish foot juggler Vanessa Alvarez making her first appearance on American television; and an 8-year-old singing sensation from Ellen’s hometown of New Orleans, Tione Johnson, making her Vegas debut. A planned multi-egg juggling act was shelved last minute simply because of time constraints.

European illusionist Hans Klok, one-time headliner with Pamela Anderson at Planet Hollywood here, was the final act of Ellen’s show. He had just five minutes remaining to race through six magic illusions, the last of which had him handcuffed and manacled under water in a small tank for two minutes.

“That starts as a real test of my breathing abilities,” he told me after the show. “Then it becomes a metamorphosis when I escape and my assistant in a split second winds up chained under water before kicking out a panel through the rushing water to escape. It’s an incredible illusion that I always wanted to do with Pamela Anderson during our Planet Hollywood show Beauty of Magic, but everybody thought it too difficult and too dangerous. My only problem is that I’m soaked to the skin, standing there with my clothes ruined and my hair totally water-ruined.

“We all had to stand there on stage after the show ended for the official photos, so you can see I’m looking completely washed out!”

It was an incredible two-continent, 48-hour, whirlwind schedule for Hans, who managed to squeeze in a “magical” reunion with our hometown hero Siegfried Fischbacher over dinner at Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant in the Forum Shops at Caesars. Our contributing celebrity photographer Tom Donoghue captured our exclusive photos as they toasted!

Ellen’s invitation to Hans to close her special was made only five weeks ago when he appeared on her Los Angeles-based daytime talk show. So he flew from Amsterdam to Chicago and onto Vegas all day Wednesday, arriving here late night with his three stage assistants, all the equipment and magic boxes and four crew members. They got one brief run-through rehearsal onstage yesterday just before the actual taping.

“It was a very expensive appearance,” Hans told me. To make economic sense of the costly flights and equipment shipping, plus Hans and his assistants’ fees, he tapes another Ellen show on the Caesars stage this morning for later broadcast. “Ellen loves magic, and this will be my fifth appearance this year on her show,” he said.

Hans leaves the resort immediately afterwards at 2 p.m. today for a 4:30 p.m. red-eye Virgin Atlantic flight to London. He will arrive there tomorrow morning and change planes after clearing customs and immigration to get to Amsterdam, where he will perform another live two-hour spectacular show in the Dutch capital tomorrow night.

“You get through the craziness of it all because you don’t even have time to think about it,” he told me over dinner. We’ll have the rest of our interview with the Dutch-born illusionist, including what lessons he learned from his first unsuccessful run on the Strip with Pamela and his vow to return in triumph next time, next week over Thanksgiving!

Siegfried wasn’t able to attend Ellen’s show, but heavyweight Flamingo comedian George Wallace was in the nearly filled theater. He and Ellen got in the briefest of hello greetings at the end of the show.

“She is one funny lady,” George told me, “and these variety acts were simply incredible.”

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