… especially in Las Vegas. I snurched that headline from a Las Vegas Advisor "Last Second Flash" which disclosed that the Gold Coast would be ringing down the curtain on Forever Plaid in April. (I sure hope this doesn’t mean the demise of my favorite coffee shop, Rejavanate, run by one of the Plaids.) Forever Plaid’s producer blamed the Las Vegas Hilton’s Menopause: The Musical as being the fatal dagger-thrust through the fabric of Plaid. So does this mean The Change > Fifties Nostalgia? Dunno, but Menopause has proven to be a true category-killer among Las Vegas shows. You can’t classify it and, as the latest news indicates, you can’t beat it.

The Plaid announcement was reiterated in today’s Las Vegas Sun, which amplified the news with a few other (distant) death-knells for Vegas shows. A Dec. 15 closing date has been posted for Celine Dion’s A New Day and a mid-2008 one for Mamma Mia!, down at Mandalay Bay. The former scarcely comes as a shock and the latter hardly portends failure, either. The ABBA musical will have enjoyed a five-and-a-half-year run by the time it goes dark (in other words, five years more than Hairspray) while Dion’s show will be nearing the five-year mark. That’s probably more than anyone expected, especially in the case of Mamma Mia!

What will Mandalay Bay replace its bread-and-butter show with? A Cirque du Soleil show? No! Surely you jest! Get out of here with your out-of-the-box thinking!

More bad news: … for Le Reve, but good news for ticket buyers. According to LVA, premium weekend prices for the struggling Steve Wynn/Franco Dragone co-production (although Dragone has been bought out) have been eliminated and the four price tiers have been reduced to three. The average ticket price has gone from $104.50 to $98.65.

Life’s better if you’re George Wallace. The average ticket price for his show has risen from $70 to $81.