You are sitting in one of 17,600 seats under a screen that wraps up, over and around you, while a funnel cloud rolls across it, wind from high-powered machines whips through the rows, paper leaves and smoke sweep past and your seat starts to rumble in time with the thunder, which leaves two fair questions: what exactly is this, and is the chair meant to be doing that?
Yes, the chair is meant to do that. This is The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, which Sphere Entertainment made with Warner Bros. Discovery, Google and Magnopus, and which opened in late August 2025. Before the end, foam apples are thrown at the audience, drone-powered flying monkeys circle the arena and foam snow falls during the poppy field scene. Kevin Zelman, reviewing it for WTVC NewsChannel 9 that September, wrote that the twister is “made to feel like you’re actually inside of it”. He added that you are almost able “to feel the humid heat a Kansas tornado produces”.
For most of the last century, a night out in Las Vegas meant something to look at, from the lights of the Strip to the feathered lines of the showgirl revue. Its newest big attractions sell sensation: wind, vibration, scent and a performer a few feet from your seat. So why would a city built on looking start selling feeling?
Built to be looked at
On 11 February 2016, Jubilee! gave its final performance at Bally’s. Donn Arden’s revue had cost $10 million to open in 1981, KSNV reported when the closing was announced. Scott Roeben of Vital Vegas, citing the Las Vegas Sun, put it at 18,720 performances over 34 years, from a first night on 31 July 1981. The company had shrunk along the way. Cyndi Lee, a former singer in the show, told KSNV there were “originally 135 cast members on the stage; now about 70”.
Every part of it was made to be seen from a seat. NPR’s Fred Wasser reported in February 2016 that the dancers went through eight to 12 costume changes in about 90 minutes. The routines took in Samson and Delilah and even the Titanic. Bob Mackie and Pete Menefee designed the costumes, and one sketch called for 300 chandelier crystals and as many pheasant feathers. It was skilled work, too. The Associated Press noted in 2008 that early Las Vegas showgirls had included classically trained European ballerinas, and that Jubilee! still required trained dancers. John Katsilometes, a Las Vegas Sun columnist, told NPR the show seemed “trapped in time”.
The same AP report traced the long line behind it. Donn Arden had imported the Lido de Paris in 1958, and nearly every major casino put showgirls on stage in the 1960s. By November 2008, only two large-scale revues were left on the Strip. The AP reported in January 2009 that Folies Bergere, which opened at the Tropicana in 1959, would close on 28 March after 49 years. When Jubilee! followed in 2016, KSNV called it “the last of the showgirl stage spectaculars”.
On closing night, UNLV’s David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research, told KSNV that showgirls were first added to support headliners in the 1940s and 1950s. Sometimes they became the main attraction, and now, he said, the city was going back to shows led by headliners. Erin Blakemore of National Geographic wrote in August 2025 that showgirls sometimes eclipsed the big-name acts on the bill. The genre declined in the 1970s and 1980s, she wrote, and the opulent revue is “a thing of the past”. Roeben’s explanation for the closures was blunter. Casinos used to subsidise shows from gaming revenue, he wrote, and shows now had to earn their own way. In the year to June 2024, the Nevada Gaming Control Board counted $21.9 billion in total revenue at Strip casinos grossing $1 million or more. Gaming was $5.7 billion of it, about a quarter, and the rest came from rooms, food, drink and other attractions.
The showgirl has not disappeared. A smaller revue still runs on the Strip. In May 2026 the Nevada State Museum of Las Vegas unveiled a refreshed showgirl exhibit, FOX5 reported. The museum already held costumes from Folies Bergere, Jubilee!, Hello Hollywood and the Lido.
Rooms full of pictures
The next big bet was a room you could walk into. AREA15, which calls itself “the world’s first immersive entertainment district, built from scratch in Las Vegas”, opened its first phase on 17 September 2020, blooloop reported. Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart followed on 18 February 2021, and KSNV described it that morning as “an exhibit with an in-depth narrative and interactive elements”. Meow Wolf calls it “a surreal grocery store selling bizarre products, with hidden portals and secret rooms”. A day after the opening, Attractions Magazine counted four themed areas, 60 rooms and portals (one of them a walk-through refrigerator) and work by more than 325 artists. The Santa Fe New Mexican reported that Omega Mart welcomed 1,000,007 visitors in its first year.
The boom did not last. In March 2026, Corey Levitan of Casino.org reported that Illuminarium at AREA15 would close on 6 March. It was the fifth similar Las Vegas attraction to close in the past two and a half years. Immersive exhibits, he wrote, “typically deliver a 30- to 45-minute experience that satisfies once but rarely compels repeat visits”, and tourists “are no longer satisfied with just being ‘immersed’ inside of a projection”. Touch was not enough on its own: the same article listed Illuminarium as a 33,000 sq ft room “with haptic floors and 360° screens”, and it closed anyway.
Alicia Yaffe, in an opinion piece for XP Land in January 2026, took aim at the word itself. She said Sphere’s Oz and a Bob Marley show, Hope Road, were both “immersive in the literal sense that water is immersive; they surround you”. The real thing, she argued, “requires the audience’s participation in order to move forward” and is “dynamic and responsive to the guest”. She put Oz at “a one on the immersion scale”, even though the whole building “shakes and quakes” with its haptic seating each time the Wicked Witch appears.
By her test, a chair that shakes is still a way of watching. Yet it is the detail both Yaffe and Zelman reached for. Las Vegas has started to sell a show you feel in your body, whether or not you steer it.
Closer than the front row
Sphere opened on 29 September 2023, with U2 starting a multi-month run, and its makers were selling sensation within a week. The Sphere Experience began on 6 October with Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth, which Sphere Entertainment called “the first production to feature the venue’s multi-sensory 4D technologies”. The company’s release called the 16K by 16K screen “the highest resolution LED screen on Earth”. It also promised “immersive seats with an infrasound haptic system”. Their “deep vibrations so guests can feel the experience” were meant for moments such as a rumble of thunder or a rocket launch. Wind and smell were on the list too: “the feeling of a cool breeze and familiar scents”. In 2026 the venue’s home page was advertising “NEW 4D EFFECTS” for Oz.
The adult end of the Strip had moved its audience closer years before. Absinthe has played Caesars Palace since 2011, in what its producer, Spiegelworld, calls a “custom circus tent on the Roman Plaza”. Its 15th anniversary there fell in April 2026, KLAS reported. The tent is a spiegeltent, “German for ‘mirror tent'”, and the acts are “staged just feet from the audience”, who sit all the way round the stage. Spiegelworld calls it “strictly an 18-and-over show” with adult language and content. It also warns that the sound and lighting can be as intense as a loud concert, with strobes, haze and audience interaction. Magic Mike Live takes the idea upwards. In November 2020, KSNV reported its planned move to the Sahara, into a new theatre with zip lines and a two-storey bar that doubles as a performance space. Its producer, BASE Entertainment, says the performers are “in front of, behind, above and all around the audience”.
In August 2023, Oliver Lovat, a casino-development executive who runs Denstone Group, told CDC Gaming Reports he expected “a slew of experiential entertainment coming to town”. He gave it three to five years, with immersive theatre among it. Away from the high-end gaming resorts, he said, everything has to be entertainment driven. A 2025 industry report from the Gensler Research Institute and the Immersive Experience Institute looked well beyond Las Vegas. It found that “traditional, passive forms of media and live performance are largely stagnant or declining”.
At the other end of the scale from Sphere’s 17,600 seats, the venue drops away and the experience travels to the guest, one to one. Ayelisa, an independent Nuru practitioner in Las Vegas, has “provided Nuru since 2010”. “A session in Las Vegas is outcall”, she says, and “many of my Las Vegas clients are professionals visiting for a conference”.
What Las Vegas sells now
None of this has emptied the casino floor. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s 2025 visitor profile found that 81 per cent of visitors gambled, a higher share than in any of the four years before. The change is in the entertainment around the tables. About one in five visitors saw a show in 2025. Fewer of them chose a production show than in past years: 46 per cent, down from 54 per cent in 2024 and 57 per cent in 2023.
Costumes from Jubilee! are museum pieces now. The city once asked its visitors to admire the dancers from a distance. Today it sells the wind in a tornado and a seat that rumbles with the thunder. The spectacle is still there, and it reaches further into the room than it used to.
Words by Tom Oakley
