Below is a review of Matt’s show from TheStar.Com

For another style of reinvention, head on over to Caesars Palace, the classic Vegas hotel. In a monument to tackiness that used to be called Cleopatra’s Barge, you now have The Gossy Room. The headliner here is Matt Goss, remembered by many for his time in the British group Bros. But all that is behind him now. He’s taken his love for the Vegas of the past and mixed it with the musicianship of the present to come up with a show that is sheer dynamite. His seven-piece band features a white-hot brass section that can even make the intro to Hotel California sound exciting again. And Goss works tightly with his group, with that real feeling of give-and-take the best entertainers provide. For eye-candy, there’s a pair of white-gowned ladies to sing backup and another quartet of ebony-clad lovelies to dance in erotic abandon. And in the centre is Goss, trim tuxedo, pork-pie hat at a jaunty angle, beard just scruffy enough. He sings up a storm, everything from Sinatra classics to his own yearning ballads and the mix is sheer magic. He takes the temperature of the room and delivers what’s needed at any given moment. You can almost feel him exchanging signals with the band. Are they ready to get hotter? Let’s go, boys. Do they need to cool things down a bit? Let’s chill, fellas. The end result is what people used to go to nightclubs for: something original, unique, just-for-the-moment. Sure, you expect to hear Goss sing a Sinatra favourite like I’ve Got the World on a String, but when he also pulled a deeply personal number of his own out of the air, it seemed like something he had just decided to do on the spur of the moment, inspired by the night and the music and the crowd. We’ve all heard the stories from the past. That’s what it was like in the old days when The Rat Pack would take the stage and nobody knew what was going to happen. How drunk was Dino? How crazy was Sammy? How feisty was Frank? Nowadays with shows in 4,000-seat theatres run by banks of computers, there isn’t a lot of room for spontaneity. That’s why somebody like Goss is a welcome change of pace.

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