Viva Las Vegas!

Sam Wills was 13 when he told his parents he wanted to drop out of school to become a juggler in Las Vegas. It was, he recalls, “a double blow” as the Kiwi was home-schooled. By them.

“Yeah, pretty harsh,” the celebrated mime act, better known as Tape Face, says with a laugh. “But they were very understanding. I promised to work hard on becoming a great juggler. And I did. There's no real juggling in my show now though. I've thought about putting some in, just for the sake of it.”

The former America's Got Talent (AGT) finalist is one of a clutch of Edinburgh Fringe favourites who currently reside in Las Vegas. Performing out of his customised House of Tape, he has a three-year, six-nights-a-week contract at Harrah's Hotel and Casino. As with Edinburgh, word-of-mouth is everything in Sin City. But intense critical scrutiny is reserved for disgruntled audiences posting on TripAdvisor. And while some shows die grim, neglected deaths at the Fringe, in Vegas the costs are so high, the competition so cut-throat, that many implode in spectacular fashion.

“The lights are relentless, the advertising is relentless and the overheads are monstrous,” Wills explains. “You can't throw new talent into Vegas because the audience aren't there for it. They want to see tried and true and know exactly what they're getting.” Meanwhile, as high-living tourists, “they're so disposable. Imagine flushing the audience of Edinburgh every three days.” Certainly, he adds, “you need fringe festivals for innovation,” he adds. “Because someone can turn up there, literally with cardboard boxes and drop an incredible show.”

That's precisely what La Clique and La Soirée alumnus Amy Saunders brings with the high-energy, lo-fi aesthetic of her alter-ego's Miss Behave Gameshow. With significantly less financial backing than Tape Face, the sometime sword swallower has not only survived but prospered with an open-ended residency in a modest venue off The Strip, experiencing “an endless fringe festival. A 365-days-of-the-year Edinburgh.

“It's taught me to really hustle," she reflects. “It's been a nutty ride in a service town that exists only to facilitate gambling, sex and debauchery.”

Saunders' roots are in front-of-house hospitality rather than performing. She reveres vaudeville and the lounge acts of Jack Benny and Dean Martin. And she laments the bottom-line mentality that overtook Vegas once the Mob moved out and the giant corporations moved in.

Still, with a show that coerces audiences to use their mobile phones, she also gets to wrangle Donald Trump's America most nights, in all its liquored-up and divided opinion. Transplanting that to Edinburgh once again, with her glamorous assistant Tiffany, there's all the hedonism and chaotic fun she encourages. “But since Brexit and Trump happened, there's also quite an organic message that we need to be nicer to each other,” she explains.

“I'm there purely to serve the audience's good time and they can strip their clothes off or sit texting. Either is perfect. But I straddle a neutral line of politics. So while it's subversive and interactive, it's inclusive too. There's no racism, sexism or homophobia allowed.”

The first Vegas booking in the career of John van der Put, aka Piff The Magic Dragon, was a 10-year contract for a show that “crashed and burned within six months”. Very different to his 2007 Fringe debut, the musical Mikey the Pikey, which was a breakout smash. “And a lot of my success has come from Edinburgh”, he says. Subsequently reaching the final of AGT, he returned to Nevada with a lucrative deal and recently celebrated his 500th show there.

Despite hating 97 per cent of magic, “which brings out the inner dickhead in most”, van der Put acknowledges that Vegas is its natural home. There he can happily take two years to perfect a trick that will entertain on tour. Switching from performing seven nights a week to a mere 11 over a month in the Scottish capital (with chihuahua sidekick Mr Piffles, the mind-reading Dog Who Knows), “I'm not even kidding, Edinburgh is our holiday for the year.”

Essentially critic-proof—“you couldn't get more gimmicks in my show if you tried”—he's not worried by UK audiences' greater cynicism about magic either. “They can't be more cynical than me,” he says with a snort. “I spend most of my life trying to convince people that a dog is doing magic, which is so ridiculous. It's the same level of stupidity as a regular magic act, it's just I'm not trying to take credit for it.”

Unlike Wills, he never envisioned becoming a Vegas headliner. And he doesn't make many career plans, treating the Fringe as a chance to “get out of my bubble and be a bit inspired by the shows there”. Similarly, Saunders will be “inhaling Edinburgh 24/7 because, fuck, I need it. They're genuinely the best audiences in the world because of the cultural mix and those sarcasm levels that I really enjoy playing with.”

Wills appreciates the “honest feedback” too. Edinburgh audiences have followed his career and “understand what I'm doing, giving me a wee bit more room to play”. And as well as indulging in a spot of tennis and risking a baby's life in his new hour, which he's approaching with a “vengeance” after the greatest hits package in his last Fringe run, he's also experimenting with a riskier production, Tape Facebook Live!

“It's like a late-night, live Muppet show, where we rehearse the audience to do a character, creating a whole bunch of obstacles for ourselves before we present it online to an audience of 300,000 people,” he explains. “I'm really excited about just trying that out and then taking it to the world.”