The MGM Grand Hotel and Casino was a hotel and casino located on the Las Vegas Strip at the intersection with Flamingo Road. Built by Kirk Kerkorian, the hotel with 2,084 rooms opened on December 5, 1973 and was one of the largest hotels in the world at that time. The hotel was later re named Ballys.

The Ziegfeld theater, was, like the Lido showroom at the Stardust, designed for and by Vegas producer Donn Arden. With the largest stage in the world and the largest backstage area. Arden was to stage his biggest extravaganza yet, his 3 million-dollar tribute to classic MGM Hollywood musicals ”Hallelujah Hollywood!". The show, which opened in 1974, ran until 1980, and included the magicians Siegfried and Roy, who had also starred in Arden's later Lido shows at the Stardust.

The costumes were designed by Bob Mackie. Its flamboyant finale was a tribute to the Ziegfeld Follies.

Jubilee! Was created as an updated version of Hallelujah Hollywood by Don Arden. It opened in August 1981 and is still running some 28 years later. The Jubilee! showgirls are an icon of old Vegas. The show uses costumes designed by Bob Mackie. The lavish sets where designed by Ray Klausen and include the sinking of the Titanic.

Jubilee's principal dancer from the opening night until her departure 23 years later was Linda Green, and this amazing 23 year record is still hailed in the Guinness Book of World Records
Jubilee! features a cast of 85 showgirls and showboys.

There are 75 stagehands working on the show. The feathered headdresses worn by the showgirls can weigh up to 35 pounds.

The show takes the form of 7 acts punctuated by three variety front curtain performances. Although after 28 years the show is inevitably dated it is perhaps the only show of its kind in the world, a true piece of living breathing Americana.

DONN ARDEN ( Producer Jubilee )

Arden's dance troupe headlined the Desert Inn's opening in 1950. He later developed the Lido de Paris show, which ran at the Stardust from 1958 to 1991, and the Jubilee show at Bally's.

Arden was born Arlyle Arden Peterson. He grew up in St. Louis. Arden decided he was better suited to organize and direct dance shows rather than perform in them. Arden got his first break in Cleveland, where he staged floor shows in clubs operated by racketeer Moe Dalitz. "My success was due to - I hate to use the word 'mafia'," Arden once said.

Donn Arden didn't invent topless showgirls parading sensually wearing heavy feathered headdresses, glittering costumes and omnipresent smiles. He was not the first in showbiz to employ quirky novelty acts, handsome lead singers and winsome chorus dancers, then surround them with massive stage sets and mind-boggling special effects. But the late producer was certainly the first to fuse these elements into such creative, over-the-top presentations that would become known worldwide as Las Vegas showroom spectaculars.

His flair for blending beauty and good old song-and-dance, with amazing re-stagings of disasters such as the sinking of the Titanic and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, earned Arden the titles of king of the modern production show and the "Master of Disaster."

His impact is still felt today, years after his death and almost 50 years since Arden's showgirls and boys performed with headlining ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (with dummy Charlie McCarthy) and singer Vivian Blaine at the April 24, 1950, opening of Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn.

Bally's "Jubilee," a bare-flesh laden spectacle that's sunk the Titanic more than 15,000 times since it opened in 1981, is the last living testament to Arden's genius. It will no doubt be the last show of its kind in this increasingly high-tech era.

Arden shook up the entertainment world, not to mention American morals, when he imported an "English edition" of "Lido de Paris" to the Stardust Hotel in 1958. When the first topless showgirl paced across the Stardust stage displaying her breasts as well as the sensual "showgirl walk" that Arden patented and demanded of his females he had began to leave his mark on Vegas.

"There's a certain way a girl can walk, particularly when you're going across the stage," Arden said in an interview published in 1989 in Jefferson Graham's "Vegas Live And In Person., By simply twisting the foot, it swings the pelvis forward, which is suggestive and sensual. If you twist right and swing that torso, you get a revolve going in there that's just right. It isn't the way a woman should walk, necessarily, unless she's a hooker. You're selling the pelvis; that's the Arden Walk."

Arden was notorious for requiring the right kind of bodies in his spectaculars such as "Hello America," "Hello, Hollywood, Hello!" and "Hallelujah Hollywood.. "We specify no girls under 5-foot-8," Arden said. "I can't tell you how many girls 5-foot-4 show up. But we have to audition them (under equal rights laws) even when there's no chance of us hiring them. Arden demanded "small and firm" breasts for his women, "tight and firm" butts on his male dancers.

"I think I can be very nice, and I think I can be very mean," Arden said. "But you know within the first eight bars whether they can sing or not. Sometimes you can tell in two. And the same thing applies to dancers. There's no such thing as a natural dancer. The dancers I hire absolutely must have proper ballet training. They must have jazz training. You have no time, even in 10- to 12-hour rehearsals, to teach a girl who has never had training to dance."

He dared to do things that had never been tried on a stage before, Some of the things he came up with didn't seem possible. Such as having a DC-9 rev its engines as it seemingly prepared for takeoff, right through the audience. Collapsing Delilah's temple in a heap of columns. Sinking the Titanic in "Jubilee!," or flooding the stage with thousands of gallons of water from a bursting dam. Amazons. Waterfalls. Spaceships. Celestial goddesses. Can-can girls. Argentine gauchos. Magicians. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers clones. Smoke and fire. Spangles. Stand-up comics. Crooners.

Jubilee itself was the star and completely non-reliant on financially risky headliners. Productions costs, while hefty, were mostly fixed. As were profits. Bosses wanted to give Arden a lump sum for his efforts but he always declined. "With my drinking and gambling, I never believed in that," he once said. "I'd rather have the security of a weekly paycheck." Arden's steady cash flow enabled him to buy homes in Palm Springs and Mission Viejo, Calif., both easy bases for jaunts to Las Vegas for periodic check-ups on his creations.

"My business, it seems like it's going out of fashion," he once said, unaware of $100 million-plus productions (new theater included) to come, such as Cirque du Soleil's "O" at Bellagio. "I'm known to be an expensive guy, and it just costs money to put these shows on. You spend money, you make money. Of course, I could put them out there in a bikini and stick a feather in their head and one bracelet on the arm and little earrings, but that isn't the glamorous show that I do. The things that make my show look right are expensive."

Only two Arden alumni ever went on to achieve large-scale fame. One was Valerie Perrine, "a secretary from Scottsdale with a lisp," who went on to star in Hollywood films ("Lenny," "Slaughterhouse Five") after a stint as a parade nude and leading body in "Lido de Paris." Actress Goldie Hawn, remembered by Arden as "a skinny fruitcake," was fired from Arden's chorus line at the Desert Inn after three weeks of covered dancing. That forced her to Hollywood and a career that has lasted since the mid-1960s and TV's "Laugh-In."

Over the years there were fewer shows offering topless showgirls. Some such, as Jeff Kutash's "Splash," featured bare breasts, contemporary taped music and leaner staging for an investment of about $1 million. Ardens' $10 million jobs began to seem like financial burdens.

You can safely say there will never be another one like him, Arden was a genius at what he did and his style will never be duplicated. Donn Arden shows always had a certain air of fantasy and escapism about them, and he opened the doors for the mega-shows that came in the 1990s.

Arden's health began to fail in the early 1990s and he became a less-frequent visitor to Las Vegas. Years of chain-smoking and the showbiz life began to take a toll on his body. When he died Nov. 2, 1994, at his Los Angeles home, the lights on the Strip were dimmed in memory of the 78-year-old producer.

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