Cher kicked off her first official concert residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada, in the spring of 2008. “Cher” ran for three years, included 192 shows, and grossed $97 million. The pop icon had an “unofficial” residency in Las Vegas back in the late 1970s and early 1980s for her “Take Me Home” tour, which she primarily performed at the Circus Maximus Showroom at Caesars Palace. Those shows took place at 9 pm and 12:30 am nightly, seven days a week, which requires endurance not only from the performer but from the late-night audiences, as well.
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Needless to say, Cher was in for a wakeup call when she returned to Caesars Palace almost three decades later. C’est la vie.
Cher Said Her First Official Las Vegas Residency Was Difficult
Cher has been a staple of the pop music scene since the mid-1960s, when she was one-half of the iconic Sonny & Cher duo, singing hits like “I Got You Babe”. From there, her star continued to rise, branching off into a solo career full of glitz, glamour, and barely-there outfits. In addition to being a musical performer, Cher has also been a television personality and actor in film and television. Throughout her decades-long career, she amassed a huge fanbase—some of whom had been with her since the beginning. And as she learned during her late 2000s residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, time waits for no one. Not pop stars and not their audiences.
During an appearance on the Graham Norton Show, Cher explained what made her Las Vegas residency so difficult, and it does sound like quite the reality check. “Well, [the audience is] not allowed to stand up, and they’re very, very old. And sometimes they’ve had walkers, and sometimes they had oxygen masks. I’m not kidding. And it took me a long time, because I was very angry for a long time. Then, finally, I thought, ‘You know, this might be the last concert they ever see.’”
Despite Cher’s surprise at the median age of her Las Vegas audiences, the fact that the concertgoers would be older is certainly reasonable. If most of her diehard fans—the ones willing to pay the price tag for a Las Vegas ticket—have been with her since the early days of her career, that means they were watching Cher decades ago. Cher herself was in her early 60s when “Cher” first opened, so why wouldn’t her audience be people also in their 60s, 70s, or even 80s? Indeed, time marches on.
Other Parts of Her Three-Year Concert Run Surprised Her, Too
The age of her audience wasn’t the only thing that threw Cher for a loop when she started her first official Las Vegas residency. The harsh desert climate took a toll on her, too. “The only thing that I kind of didn’t anticipate for some reason, I don’t know where my brain is, but I didn’t anticipate the dryness getting to my throat the way it did,” Cher told CBS News in 2009. “So, when I’m there, I have to kind of live like a nun and not talk during the day. But that’s the only unusual thing.” She added that vocal rest is “so hard for me. I have to remind myself about 100 times a day because I’m not the kind of person that doesn’t want to talk.”
Still, the residency wasn’t all old folks and dry sinuses. “Performers love to perform,” she told CBS. “That’s the thing that we do. I think one of the best things was being able to imagine anything that I wanted, anything that I came up with, we could do because this theatre is unbelievable. I come home twice a week, so I’m kind of at home. I’m not there that much. But it takes me 40 minutes to get home [in Los Angeles]. It’s like doing a show from my bedroom.”
From the sounds of it, those audience members with walkers and oxygen masks might have been doing more partying in Vegas than Cher was.
Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images
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