BILL ORDINE Caesars takes a gamble on Celine

Casinos may be in the gambling business but generally, it's not luck that they rely on for success -- just cold, hard arithmetic.
However, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas is rolling the dice in a big way as it prepares to launch a major entertainment production that it hopes will rival the show extravaganzas of its mega-resort neighbors. Although one of the most famous casinos in the world, Caesars Palace has for years lacked a blockbuster house show, such as the Cirque du Soleil productions at Bellagio and Treasure Island, or impersonator Danny Gans and magicians Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage.
In March, Caesars Palace hopes to make up ground when it opens its new Colosseum entertainment venue with a multimedia spectacle starring Celine Dion.
The French-Canadian singer who lullabied the Titanic to rest at the bottom of the Atlantic with "My Heart Will Go On" has been signed to do 200 shows a year for a minimum of three years in the Colosseum, which is nearing completion in front of the hotel-casino on the Vegas Strip.
The $95 million contemporary version of Rome's ancient wonder has 4,000 seats, and ticket prices for the Dion show -- scheduled to open March 25 -- are $87.50, $127.50, $150 and $200. The effort to fill such a huge venue for so many nights at those prices might itself be titanic, and Caesars Palace has to hope that's where the comparison ends.
The 90-minute show, titled "A New Day," won't be merely a Dion concert. Rather, it will be a spectacle directed by Franco Dragone -- the production magician who pulled off the mesmerizing and immensely popular Cirque du Soleil's "O" at Bellagio and "Mystere" at Treasure Island.
Dragone will surround Dion with 60 dancers, musicians and performance artists who have been rehearsing in Belgium since June, and will back up the songstress with a large screen that will depict surreal settings.
"It will be an artificially created landscape with Celine and the performers moving through this hologram and tying it into reality," said Robert Stewart, a spokesman for Caesars Palace.
For instance, at times, the performers will appear to fly, and together with the stage's proscenium extending into the audience, the effect will be to weave electronic illusion with live performance -- and, producers hope, draw the audience into the fantasy.
Tickets for the show's first three months have been available through the Caesars Palace Web site, www.caesars.com, where a pop-up window moves prospective customers to Ticketmaster, or through Dion's Web site, www.celinedion.com. For show information: 1-888-995-1555.
Restaurants
Along with "A New Day," Caesars Palace is planning a rollout of several attractions that it hopes will give it a second wind in the race with other upscale resorts.
In March, San Francisco Bay Area celebrity chef Bradley Ogden will open his first restaurant outside California at Caesars Palace. Ogden's cuisine highlights farm-fresh American ingredients; a typical menu item from his Lark Creek Inn in Marin County is Sonoma duck breast with green lentils, confit, baby carrots, and Sausalito Springs watercress. Also part of intermediate-range planning is a nightclub-restaurant aimed at an older patron than the current crop of Vegas clubs, and a third phase of the Caesars Palace Forum shopping mall.
Penny slots
New technology is reviving one of gaming's relics, the penny slot machine. Multiline, multiwager video slot machines combined with voucher systems or "tokenization" formats have made penny slots both viable and popular.
The Tropicana and Bally's Park Place are among Atlantic City casinos that have the new penny slots. The Trop brought them in June and now has 28 one-cent machines and 12 two-cent machines. The games have themes, such as Chickendales, in which cartoon chickens do silly dances in bonus rounds, and generally offer nine playing lines and accept up to five coins per line.
Of course, few casino patrons would want to actually load up with rolls of pennies to slip into the machines and certainly would not want to be paid off in copper. So, at the Tropicana, players enter either paper money or one-dollar tokens to begin play. When they cash out, gamblers get dollar tokens back and are required to play off any excess credits (meaning less than a dollar) remaining on the machine.
Bally's Park Place uses a ticket system that requires players to put paper money in the machine -- or a payoff ticket they received when cashing out at a previous machine -- and are paid back with a paper ticket for the exact credit amount.
XYou can contact Bill Ordine at ordineb@aol.com.