Las Vegas to bid adieu to René Angélil
Dion won’t perform at tribute but Sin City’s movers to pay homage
René Angélil is still presiding over the Strip.
There is a huge Roman-style pillar just outside Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, with a giant video screen advertising different events at Caesars’ marquee venue The Colosseum. Every few minutes, the screen features a close-up of Angélil with information on Celebration of Life, the tribute planned for Wednesday night at the Colosseum.
It’s Las Vegas’s homage to Céline Dion’s late husband and manager, and some of the top movers and shakers in the Vegas entertainment business will be taking the stage at the 4,000-seat theatre to pay their last respects to the man who revolutionized the live music scene in this entertainment capital.
Angélil died Jan. 14 at age 73 after a lengthy battle with throat cancer.
Details were scarce as to who will be speaking at the ceremony but late Tuesday it was confirmed that David Foster and Mitch Garber will both take the stage to talk about Angélil. Foster is a Grammy-Award-winning producer and songwriter who has worked with Natalie Cole, Barbra Streisand and Whitney Houston, and produced many Dion hits, including Because You Loved Me, The Power of Love and All by Myself. Garber is a Montreal businessman, CEO of Caesars Acquisition Company and chairman of the board of the Cirque du Soleil. There is talk that other artists will be there Wednesday but nothing is confirmed yet.
Dion will likely speak at the end of the tribute but that will depend on how she’s feeling Wednesday. She definitely will not be performing. It has been a trying past several weeks for the Quebec pop star. She greeted crowds of fans for hours at Notre-Dame Basilica in Old Montreal Jan. 21 and then was back for Angélil’s funeral the next day. The day after that, she was at a private memorial service for her brother Daniel, who also died of cancer.
The ceremony Wednesday at the Colosseum is also expected to include top executives from AEG Live, the concert promotion giant owned by Ans chutz Entertainment Group. The funeral at Notre-Dame Basilica was Quebec’s goodbye to one of the province’s most famous businessmen. The Celebration of Life is Las Vegas’s adieu to Angélil and it’s only fitting the city gives him a major sendoff.
Angélil revolutionized Vegas — and the entire concert business for that matter. When he first brought Dion here with the show A New Day, back in 2003, Vegas was considered a place for washed-up pop stars. The success of that show — it grossed more than $400 million in five years — changed all that. Since then, some of the planet’s hottest singers have followed Dion’s lead and taken up semi-permanent residence here. Mariah Carey is at the Colosseum this week, Elton John just wrapped a series of shows at the same hall, and Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and Carlos Santana have all performed similar runs in Sin City.
John Nelson — the senior vicepresident of AEG Live Las Vegas — worked closely with Angélil and Dion when they created that first show and built the Colosseum specifically for her series of concerts. In an interview in August, just as Dion was set to return to Caesars after a one-year hiatus, Nelson had nothing but praise for Angélil.
“Céline and René always had, in my opinion, really wise timing,” Nelson said. “René is the smartest man I ever met in the business. He (could) see around corners. He (could) somehow know what was coming. He (was) the most prescient manager in the business. We did those five years of shows, 717 shows, and then he decided to stop here for a while and do (international) touring. That was 20072008. That was at a time when the economy was suffering, which affected tourism to Las Vegas. Those were a long couple of years in Vegas and they had the great foresight to be off from Vegas. They came back when things were improving and now business is booming in Las Vegas.”
In Georges-Hébert Germain’s biography of Angélil, Le maître du jeu, Germain describes how Dion’s manager sold AEG owner Phil Anschutz on the notion of Dion playing a permanent show at the Colosseum and how Angélil then negotiated an extremely advantageous deal whereby Angélil and AEG would pay the costs of creating the production and thereby reap a bigger share of the profits.
It was a great business deal for Angélil and Dion. But 13 years later, it’s also clear that it was a great deal for the city of Las Vegas, which is why so many in this city want to pay their final respects Wednesday.
Celebration of Life will be streamed live on the web, from 10 p.m. to midnight Eastern Time at: reneangelilcelebrationoflife.com
Céline and René always had, in my opinion, really wise timing. René is the smartest man I ever met in the business.