Creating the new Lake of Dreams at Wynn Las Vegas Behind The Waterfall
7The All-New Lake of Dreams Show
Discover the all-new Lake of Dreams show, a multimedia experience that blends colorful puppetry, an immersive soundtrack, and state-of-the-art sound and lighting to create an unforgettable spectacle on Wynn’s signature water attraction. Sparkling with 5,500LED lights, the 3-acre Lake of Dreams is framed by a 90-foot performance waterfall and 1,500 pine trees, the backdrop for sensational visuals designed by a world-class team that includes Emmy-winning director Kenny Ortega, production designer Michael Curry, and lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe. Whether you’re enjoying cocktails at Parasol Down or dinner on the patio at Lakeside or SW Steakhouse, Wynn’s Lake of Dreams is The Strip’s most spellbinding experience.
Hours
Shows are complimentary and run nightly every half hour beginning at dusk.
A 105-foot-high, pine-topped manmade mountain behind a 45-foot-high waterfall that doubles as a screen; a woman’s oversized head emerging from the lake below; a singing frog; glowing orbs. Behind the scenes is award-winning production designer Michael Curry, currently reimagining this favorite Wynn Las Vegas spectacle.
From the launch of the Lake of Dreams in 2005, Curry envisioned the mini-performances through the lens of a couple on a date.
To that end, every song is shorter than three minutes (around 1.5 in SW Steakhouse in Wynn Palace), and the concepts are playful. And though Wynn has in its arsenal a playlist of songs that’s 20 years long, “They’re storytelling songs, always.”
The Lake of Dreams was always meant to be a format that would involve so many technical processes that an artist could reimagine shows. Producer, director, and choreographer Kenny Ortega, who directed such films as the High School Musical trilogy and counts Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off among his choreography credits, is doing the film work for the Lake of Dreams.
The idea is to create vignettes on the lake that resemble your evening: small chatter, big moments, personal interaction. The Lady of the Lake is not the only entr’acte. Those who love the current tête-à-tête between a pair of glowing, sighing orbs might appreciate their transformation, via interior projection, into a pair of eyeballs following the movements of a shark fin—accompanied, hilariously, by “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” by Franki Valli and the Four Seasons. “We’re adding a lot of humor that we didn’t have before,” Curry says, “and intimate, small stuff—things that come right to the audience.” The spheres later sing Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe” as emojis.
Of course, the favorites stay. Wynnie returns, now with a fuller range of animation— wearing a fedora, holding a glass of whiskey, and singing a few new songs.
The era of the big Vegas spectacle had begun, too, and Curry found that his aesthetic was very much in line with the Wynn Resorts' way of thinking.
Unlike some of the avant-garde directors with whom Curry has worked, he both bestows credit liberally and also appreciates the sense of teamwork that has always gone into entertainment and design at Wynn.
With the new lake of dreams vignettes opening this spring, new shows in SW steakhouse in Wynn Palace next year, and Crystal Pavilion, the theater and museum expansion adjacent to Wynn Palace scheduled to open in 2022, Curry’s plate is quite full with Wynn Resorts work—all of it being worked on simultaneously. He pulls up computer renderings of a 160-foot-high gong spire made of 60,000 pounds of bronze that rises up into a dome conceived for Crystal Pavilion, around which a golden-costumed aerialist driven by a computer travels a circular track and engages in a kind of symphonic gong-bathing for passersby.
As for the rest of us, we should turn in early. Come midnight, Michael Curry is counting on the extra creative juice. ~ Andrea Bennett for Wynn Magazine
Spoken in the video
Matt Maddox - CEO, Wymm Resorts
Kenny Ortega - Director
Michael Curry - Production Designer
Charles Babbage - Animatronics Art Director
Sam Perkins - Technical Director
Patrick Woodroffe - Lighting Designer
Gary Jaeger - Media Creative Director
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(https://www.wynnlasvegas.com/)
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