A new attraction announced for City of Dreams could take Cotai further down the theme park path
The Bubble may not be the most auspicious name for one of the attractions at Melco Crown Entertainment’s soon-to-open City of Dreams resort on Cotai. Given the recent collapse of asset prices around the world during the banking credit crisis, it might remind one or two visitors of what they’ve lost.
What’s interesting about ‘The Bubble’ in its casino real estate form, however, is that it appears to be a clear indication that Cotai—much more than the traditionalist Macau peninsula with its heavy duty gambling—is all about a holiday experience. Cotai seems to be following the Las Vegas lead in blurring the lines between theme park and casino property.
This is because The Bubble will not only be a landmark piece of architecture, in the manner of the sphinxes at Luxor Las Vegas, but it will also have theme-park style content, along the lines of the old Treasure Island show in Vegas before it went all pecs and pole dance.
Expert help
MPEL has commissioned Falcon’s Treehouse LLC, an American company based in Orlando, Florida—the spiritual as well as actual home of the modern theme park—to produce a 10-minute piece of ‘multi media entertainment’ for visitors called Dragon’s Treasure.
This ‘content’ for The Bubble will be, to quote the rather breathless press release from MPEL: “a totally immersive and unique multi-media entertainment experience.”
This, presumably, is a fancy way of saying son et lumiere for the digital age. Further reading of the press release tends to confirm this theory.
“This 10-minute immersive multi-media experience combines high-definition video content, a sweeping musical score, over 29,000 theatrical LED lights, and a variety of sensory effects to create a stirring multi-media extravaganza,” it chirps. MPEL adds that Dragon’s Treasure incorporates eastern philosophy and Chinese mythology.
“By harnessing the vast emotional power of “elemental storytelling” and breaking familiar conventions of narrative story forms down to their most simplistic components—Dragon’s Treasure looks to surround and envelop the audience both physically and emotionally through cinematic techniques and in-theater special effects,” waffles the publicity.
Creative
Falcon’s Treehouse appears to be one of those companies that sums up the zeitgeist of modern business in that what it’s selling is to some extent intangible. According to its own website, it is a “creative services firm”, specialising in creating ‘themed experiences” and has done so for a number of clients with theme park interests including Busch Gardens, Disney, SeaWorld and the Hard Rock brand (which also has a themed hotel at City of Dreams). The company has also produced an exhibit for Science Centre Singapore.
The old fashioned among us might think an experience is something a person, well, experiences, rather than something that’s sold to us like a can of cola. We should be the ones who decide if what we’re undergoing is an ‘experience’ worthy of the name.
Still, Cotai’s future mega resorts will need to offer some form of iconic attraction in order to compete with their neighbours. Dragon’s Treasure fulfils that requirement at City of Dreams. The Venetian Macao has its resident live theatre spectacular ZAIA, lavishly produced for Las Vegas Sands Corp at a cost of more than US$150 million (according to Chinese news agency Xinhua) by the Canadian company Cirque du Soleil. The Venetian Macao also has its opera-singing gondoliers, even if the music for around half of those tenors has stopped now that the ‘fat lady’ of the global credit crisis has sung, depriving them of their work visas.
Family fun
MPEL’s Dragon’s Treasure will be free to all comers. Visitors will be able to line up outside the ‘venue within a venue’ for each show, just like in a real theme park. That theme park feeling is arguably the most groundbreaking feature of Dragon’s Treasure, setting it apart from other extravagant free attractions, such as the breathtaking Fountain Show outside the Bellagio in Vegas.
A telling point in terms of the design of City of Dreams and its bid to create a mousetrap effect via interwoven attractions is that The Bubble and its show will be next door to The Boulevard, which MPEL describes as a ‘lifestyle precinct’. This is more PR guff meaning a shopping and restaurant complex. As visitors are waiting for the show, they can while away the time with a little window-shopping or indeed the real thing.
But is this significantly different from a regular shopping mall with a multi-screen cinema or ice rink attached to it? Well yes, because you don’t find baccarat, blackjack, roulette and craps tables next door to most shopping malls or family theme parks.
The company says the initial phase of City of Dreams will open “in the first half” of this year. Along with The Bubble and its show, it will feature a 420,000 square foot casino with approximately 550 gaming tables and 1,500 gaming machines; over 20 restaurants and bars; and what it describes as “an impressive array” of some of the world’s leading retail brands. The Crown Towers Hotel and the Hard Rock Hotel offering a total of around 600 rooms will also be part of phase one. They will be joined by the 800-room Grand Hyatt Macau in the third quarter of 2009. Soon after that, a Cirque du Soleil-style theatre production “inspired” (but not apparently actually produced) by former Cirque director Franco Dragone and his company will open in the resort’s purpose-built Theatre of Dreams.
Parallels
Casino operators are of course sensitive about comparisons between integrated gaming resorts and theme parks, pointing out that the two areas are kept distinct, and that they, as responsible licensed operators, are not in the business of soliciting or otherwise encouraging minors to gamble.
Nonetheless, the ‘elephant in the casino’ with any scheme to create an integrated, family-friendly gaming resort is that the family fun must stop well short of the gaming floor.
Inevitably, and in a Las Vegas manner, The Bubble, its Dragon’s Treasure content, and no doubt the popcorn and hotdogs sold inside or nearby, will all have their own trademarks. MPEL will certainly be hoping that such theme park-style content will give it a much-needed edge during the current recession, and help it move away from Macau’s traditional reliance on hardened mainland Chinese gamblers by attracting theme park-style, free-spending family visitors.
