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Little Creek’s new events center packs in a summer of big-name singers and comedians
The entertainment season coming up features big names such as Bill Cosby, B.B. King and Howie Mandel at a new venue — the Events Center at Little Creek Casino in Shelton.
The 2,000-seat center, still being finished earlier this week, will host conventions as well as an ambitious entertainment lineup.
“There’s a need for larger-name entertainment in South Sound,” said casino general manager Doug Boon. “We feel that’s a niche we can fill. And we have known for a long time that there is need for more convention-type space in the Olympia area.”
One goal is to diversify the income of the Squaxin Island Tribe, which owns the casino.
“We are buidling long-term economic self-sufficiency for the tribe,” Boon said. “We’re turning the property into more of a destination-type resort.
“We want people to come and explore the property, whether they game or not. If they’re going to think of entertainment in the South Sound, we want them to think of us.”
The casino opened a smoke-free gaming area last week in the space formerly used for hosting smaller shows. Also planned: more hotel rooms and a golf course.
Entertainment draws new visitors to a casino, said Duncan McLeod, marketing director of Lucky Eagle Casino in Rochester. “The impact is good for a casino,” he said. “It does bring in new customers who didn’t know where we were or who we were. It brings in people who hadn’t been here for a while.”
Although it still hosts big names (Mel Tillis is coming Nov. 3), Lucky Eagle has scaled back its entertainment offerings in recent years.
“When we started in 1995, we ran a big-name show pretty much every month and we did fights every month,” McLeod said. “We were the only game in town back then, so it was pretty successful. But after a few years and with getting additional competition, we were pretty much saturating the market.
“We’ve cut back. We do have name entertainment, but we probably do about 25 percent less than we did two years ago,” he added.
In the summer, particularly, there’s a lot of competition for people’s time and their dollars, he said.
“Looking at Little Creek’s schedule, it’s a pretty impressive list of people they’ve got coming in,” McLeod added. “It will be interesting from our point of view to see how well they do. It’s a lot of top-name entertainment in a short period of time.”
Little Creek chose to launch summer entertainment following on the heels of last summer’s outdoor concert series, Boon said.
“We had up to 1,500 people who came for Jonny Lang last year,” he said. “It was a very successful venture for us, so we decided to branch out a little bit more.”
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