The newest show to hit the Las Vegas Hilton brings together some great personalities and greater vocals when Earl Turner and Lani Misalucha team up for Voices, which starts April 17.

Turner and Misalucha are both well-known and respected performers in Las Vegas, throughout the United States and around the world. Turner brings some R&B, funk, soul, gospel and country flavorings to the pair, while Misalucha delivers formal musical flavorings like opera, as well as more contemporary pop music.

Misalucha and Turner recently spoke with Casino Connection Managing Editor Greg Jones to discuss their new show.

Voices, starring Earl Turner and Lani Misalucha, plays Monday through Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Shimmer Cabaret at the Las Vegas Hilton. Tickets can be purchased from the Las Vegas Hilton box office for $49.95. There is also a $79.95 ticket package that includes dinner at Benihana.

Casino Connection: Can you give us a little background on how the two of you came together?

Misalucha: I’m very thankful that because of the producers, Earl and I were brought together for this project. What makes me excited about this show is the opportunity to work with Earl. He’s a very talented performer and I’m really looking forward to working with him.

Turner: The show was created by Angelo Giordano and John Stuart, and they actually came up with the concept of taking different performers and putting them together to do a high-energy show. John Stuart is the original producer of Legends. Angelo is in the film and casino business, and they have been friends. It’s kind of a friend connection, a networking kind of thing. They knew of Lani and they knew of me and finally they came to me with the idea, and I guess Lani liked it, so here we are.

We’re both very similar in a lot of ways in terms of how we entertain. I think our energies are very similar too. But I came up in R&B and gospel, and Lani’s background is opera and pop. It will be an interesting show because we’ll be able to cover a lot of bases musically.

How is the show structured? Is it just singing, or do you have the witty banter and everything?

Turner: The type of performers that we are, we’re not the type of people where you come in and sit down and you don’t feel it. Lani is probably as dynamic as Jennifer Hudson or Whitney Houston or Celine Dion, and if you saw her work with Society of Seven, you know she has an immediate presence on stage. She does impersonations and is just an incredible performer.

I am pretty crazy myself. My roots are funk and soul, and as far as my work here in Vegas, I’ve done all kinds of work, from gospel to country. When you take that wide of range of styles and you put two people together, it’s going to be a really exciting show.

The show is going to cover a lot of bases. We’ve got some really good ideas. We’re not Donny and Marie, though. What I have learned is that Lani is very funny and she and her family are very spiritual. For me, that works very well. I like people who believe in themselves and believe in doing good things.

Misalucha: With you (Turner), you’re not just performing, you don’t just sing to the audience, but you make the audience a part of the whole show itself. It’s the same thing with me. I really love to have my audience, when I sing a song, I make it a point to take them with me whenever I sing a song. That’s also what I see in you. You want your audience to be one with you.

Turner: We’re going to see to it that we have an exciting show musically and that it covers a lot of bases. We went to see Donny and Marie and see how their show works. There is something that is very natural and very easy between them because they know each other so well. For us it is slightly different, but not that much different because we both do what we do on stage and we’re both very comfortable with each other.

What kind of music have you two decided on?

Turner: We’re all over the board.

Misalucha: We’ll be able to cover different types of music. That’s what we like to do. We can cater to the different kinds of music that the people want to hear. For that reason, we wanted to target different ages to hopefully come into the show.

Turner: I think when people come in to see the show they are going to have a good time. I’ll use Donny and Marie as an example of something similar to what we do. When we saw them, they covered everything from Motown to musicals to Stray Cats medley. They covered a variety of things, mostly things that were not identified with them. There was “Puppy Love,” a couple of things that Marie did, but in all honesty, most of their career was not built on hit records, but on television. A lot of the music they cover is music that a broad-spectrum entertainer would think of doing, so they covered a lot of bases.

It’s really no different with us. When Lani and I sat down and talked, she was able to express to me what she wanted to do and I was able to express to her what I wanted to do, and then as fate and Lani would have it, then I had to go get it done. So we put together a really good band, a set of really great musicians, and we’re going to cover a lot of bases.

But we’re not going to give you too much. We know what to say and what not to say. We want you to come see the show and then you’ll be able to judge for yourself.

What do you do to keep the show from getting repetitive for you?

Turner: The way it is structured is that we have segments or slots. I open, I do a few numbers, introduce Lani, she comes out and does a segment. I come back out, we do a couple things together, she leaves, I do a segment and then we both close the show.

The way it sets up, I perhaps would leave the same opening number but I can change the second or third song. When Lani comes out she can change the songs in her segment. When we’re out there together, we have numbers that we can interchange. Instead of me coming out to join her for one song, we may do another one. And the end segment might also change, because we’re not interweaving an experience with setups and certain lines and everything. Not only that, if we have a guest come in, we can insert a guest singer. We can put someone else in those segments. As long as the integrity of the show is still intact, we can still do those things.

So I am not at all concerned about it becoming mundane or boring, because we have that capability within the show itself to change songs from night to night and week to week.

So it’s just a rough structure. You’ve got these signposts along the way to tell you where you are, and outside of that, you just do what you feel like doing?

Turner: Exactly. It’s a skeleton.

We have attention deficit. We get bored very easily and we want to be able to be spontaneous. You’ve got to leave room for that. We’re personality performers. We’re not Cirque, we’re not the kind of people who come in and you see exactly the same things or hear the same lines every night. That would bore me to tears. I just couldn’t do that. I’ve always had a group that worked with me that can turn on a dime. We’ve got some fine musicians as part of this group, and they know a lot of material.

People love familiarity and they love songs that they can sing along to. However, our tribute to Broadway is not going to be Phantom or West Side Story. We’re going to be a little bit outside of the box. I think often times performers, just to be safe, underestimate the intelligence of the audience. I think that you have to make the audience think up. You take a bit of a risk, but that is OK

By Greg Jones

Greg Jones is managing editor of Casino Connection Nevada, as well as associate editor of Global Gaming Business magazine.

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