BEIRUT
Show of shows
Kenneth Hurren
The Casino du Liban, which is about fifteen miles out of Beirut on a hill overlooking the Bay of Jounieh, has had the sole gaming concession in Lebanon for twenty-five years and no foreseeable change in government policy is likely to disturb its monopoly. The company is privately-owned, but the state takes the heavy end of the profits (65 per cent of the gross gaming revenue) which it is required to devote to various good works. These works are so varied and vague — ranging from the support of welfare organisations "as determined by the Ministry of Social Affairs" to "plans for the improvement of tourism" — that it's hard to say precisely where the money does go. Among government critics I heard some fairly cynical guesses as to its disposition, but in the multi-racial, polygot community of Beirut one man's Mede is another man's Persian, the rules governing any financial operation tend to be fairly free and easy and no two Lebanese are likely to agree on which way they should be bent. The chief point of interest to the passer-by is that the gaming — even with the government's hand in the till to an extent that would make our May fair entrepreneurs yelp in anguish, and offers a salutary, if unheeded, statistical lesson to those who think they can beat the wheel and the dice — can still return handsome dividends to the controlling company and subsidise the rest of the Casino's enterprises, which include a theatre (where distinguished foreign com panies appear from November to July) and a theatre-restaurant with a show that is no mere cabaret.
This latter extravagance, arbitrarily entitled Hello!, is the inspiration of Charley Henchis, a Russian-born, Paris-based producer with a flair for showgirl-infested spectacle that would have excited the envy of old Flo Ziegfeld. I saw his cornucopia uncorked the other night and I'm bound to say that it's the most opulent thing of its kind I've seen in knocking around such palaces of friVolity during the course of a dissolute career that goes back to the heyday of Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe.
I doubt, in fact, whether there is any other place in the world that has on hand the technical resources to stage it. There are twelve main tableaux, the show lasts for two-and-a-quarter hours, and only once is it necessary to bring on a front-of-curtain speciality act while a new scene is being set up. Otherwise, each moves slickly into the next, with the help — so I learned on inquiry — of such trappings as eighty-six suspension bars, electromechanically controlled, and an elevator platform that comes up from nearly 100 feet below the stage with loads of up to 140 tons of scenery and personnel. A semicircular 'aisle' cuts through the auditorium, serving by turns as a waterway for riverboats, a motor track — and an elephant walk, along which a few amiable pachyderms bear their elegant burdens of lavishly ornamented ladies. At one point the decor represents an outsize face, of which the eyes are swimming pools where girl underwater swimmers tumble in graceful aquabatics; at another, a couple of motorcyclists whirl into a wall-of-death stunt, missing each other by hairs' breadths as they criss-cross at speed inside a globe of gold mesh.
The scenic range is nothing if not international, taking in a can-can at Maxim's in the 'nineties, an American speakeasy in the Charleston era with a Keystone Cops harlequinade, a snow scene on the Steppes (in which Cossack horsemen on white horses gallop ' into ' the audience while a backwards-moving stage keeps them running on the spot), a jungle fantasy with a couple of cascading waterfalls, tropical storm and volcanic eruption; all working up to a finale that might conceivably strain the resources of Fort Knox, in which vast gilded structures come up through the floor and descend from the ceiling, with most of the show's 110 performers either drenched in gold paint or festooned with gold lame.
It is all, I daresay, a bit threadbare in the cultural values that lured soberer-sided theatrical commentators to Peter Brook's hoopla at Persepolis a few weeks ago, but the theatre is coruscation as well as catharsis, and dispiriting though it is to the aesthetic cognoscenti, the chances are that it is esteemed more for its revels than for its revolutions. I don't myself altogether approve, but the stunning showroom revels at the Casino du Liban pull in more tourists annually even than Baalbeck.
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