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Not long ago, Ivan Kane was budgeting to bring peanut butter and jelly burgers and crazy shakes to Easton Town Center, a luxury shopping development in Columbus, Ohio. Downstairs, a family-friendly restaurant for the folks crossing over from the Restoration Hardware across the street, upstairs the latest iteration of his legendary Forty Deuce nightclub, a bawdy rock burlesque supper club for grown people who want more adult entertainment than the Victoria’s Secret down the block has to offer.
The Rust Belt was an odd detour for the Hollywood rock club savant, who, after breaking out in Best Picture Oscar winner Platoon, gave up his acting career to become the king of LA nightlife. But even in a state that has tried to censor Larry Flynt and Robert Mapplethorpe, while lifting up JD Vance, Forty Deuce, with its pepperoni slices, spiked lemonades, and all night lingerie-clad gyrations, is thriving. If Ivan Kane could make a pizza oven and a stripper pole work in a midwest mall for the past six years, he could surely do it anywhere, and that’s why Forty Deuce has reopened in its former home at Mandalay Bay on the southern tip of the Las Vegas strip, 5000 square feet of nightly stripteasing to sleazy guitars and drums in a sweaty basement.
Kane first opened Forty Deuce in Hollywood, in 2002, emboldened by his wife, Champagne Suzy, an ex-burlesque dancer Kane first met in acting class. “She said to me, ‘we should do a burlesque show in a club.’ And in those days, that wasn’t gonna fly in LA because LA nightlife at the time was all about seeing and being seen. But I was convinced if we set the bar high, people would come,” Kane says.
It wasn’t long before Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears found their way there, and Kane says, “that started a cycle of celebrity investors and clientele.”
Forty Deuce opened its doors in Hollywood the same year Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remake hit theaters. It was a huge year for Kane. That movie spawned a Vegas renaissance in the last days before camera phones, EDM, and private equity wiped out the last of the showgirl headliners and cheap prime rib. A few minutes into the film, before George Clooney and Brad Pitt get reacquainted, Clooney slips past him at the bar of a crowded Hollywood nightclub. Pitt’s distracted by a menage of go-go dancers performing behind a two-way mirror overhead. They soon reunite behind an old refrigerator door rescued from the Brown Derby, at Pitt’s A-list backroom card game. That scene was filmed at Blaze, the club Kane opened in LA prior to Forty Deuce.
In 2004, after the success of the first Ocean’s, Vegas came calling. At the time, immersive adult nightlife was in high demand – even the popular porn film Fashionistas was being reinterpreted as a modern dance production off-strip – and Kane’s flair for experiential entertainment, where human interaction, most commonly in the form of a lithe and hardbodied ex-Broadway dancer or NFL cheerleader falling out of her beaded gown, was more compelling than filming a DJ on a Nokia phone. The Vegas club was so popular, in 2005, Bravo built one of its first reality shows, Ivan Kane’s Forty Deuce, around its opening, one year ahead of launching the Real Housewives franchise. (Today, Bravo shows are wagging the dog, with Vanderpump Rules the driving force behind the Vanderpump Cocktail Garden and newly opened Vanderpump Hotel at Caesars Palace.)
When Forty Deuce closed in Las Vegas five years later, in 2009, the basement of Mandalay Bay was briefly repurposed as 1923 Bourbon and Burlesque, fronted by late Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend Holly Madison. The club didn’t last, although the 1923 Prohibition Bar lives on upstairs to this day. Meanwhile, Kane brought his concepts east, opening Royal Jelly at Revel, a more intimate burlesque alternative to day and nightclub HQ, where thousands would turn out for weekend sets from the likes of Steve Aoki and Diplo. His heartland sojourn followed, and in his absence Vegas evolved once again.
“I think Vegas has shifted dramatically into being event driven. So people are coming to Vegas because they’re going to see Backstreet Boys at the Sphere or Morgan Wallen at Allegiant Stadium; they’re experiencing Vegas because they’re in town for that particular event. When I first came to Vegas, people were coming to Vegas first because it’s Vegas, and then they would find the entertainment that would suit them while they were here,” Kane says.
Now partygoers arrive in Vegas having prepaid for their biggest entertainment expenses, which can cost more than their hotels or flights combined, whether that’s A-list artists like No Doubt or Metallica dominating the Sphere; A-list restaurants, like Chicago’s Alinea, bringing experiential dining to the Bellagio, as servers splash latex tablecloths with all textures of dessert like they’re Jackson Pollock; or even striptease queen Dita Von Teese headlining Voltaire at the Venetian for two stints a year. But MGM, the operator of Mandalay Bay and the Bellagio, are betting that if you offer the kind of intimate live entertainment that’s been missing from the city for so long, an audience will find it. In February 2024, Bellagio opened Pinky Ring, a 200-person capacity lounge where Bruno Mars selected the house bands himself; they perform nightly funk sets in between DJs, the intimacy there enhanced by a strict no phone and no photo policy, (although you can still tap to pay). That intimacy is what artists’ like Mars himself want and find lacking in the city, and it’s why he’s such a frequent performer at the club–appearing on stage 70 times last year alone.
The benefit of these clubs isn’t just live entertainment, it also fills a void in the energy required to burn off the vodka rigatoni at Carbone Riviera before headliners like Zedd or Tiesto hit the decks at 1am. The burlesque shows at Forty Deuce, and band sessions at Pinky Ring hit the stage for multiple sets just an hour after the clubs open their doors that evening.
And even if there aren’t enough venues to accommodate everyone searching for somewhere to pregame in style, it’s not for lack of talent.
“We get about 150 girls at each audition,” Kane says. “We do multiple auditions, and if I’ve hired one dancer out of those auditions, I’ve had a good day,”
“If they’re not dancing at Forty Deuce, they’re on tour dancing with the biggest artists out there, but when they dance here they’re the star.”