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Bob Marley's life and music brought to life at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas

Bob Marley's life and music brought to life at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas

Travel Weekly05-07-2025
The music, life and legacy of the legendary Bob Marley are explored in a colorful new experience at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
Bob Marley Hope Road is an interactive, multisensory visit to Marley's native Jamaica in which daytime visitors can explore at their own pace. In the evenings, it turns into a reggae performance space with cast members dancing and singing.
"Bob Marley Hope Road is a profound celebration of my father's legacy," said Cedella Marley, executive producer of Bob Marley Hope Road. "We invite everyone to dive deep into this immersive experience and feel the resonating power of his music and message, connecting hearts and souls through this extraordinary journey."
The daytime experience includes a virtual look at Trench Town, the Kingston neighborhood where Marley's musical career took root. Here, guests can pursue their own art amid the energy of Marley's performances through immersive digital and analog installations. They can mix a track at the Tuff Gong studio, watch rare concert footage and grab a drink in a Jamaican dancehall. This experience is available daily (except Wednesdays) beginning at 10 a.m. on weekends and 11 a.m. weekdays. Tickets start at $67 (plus tax and fees).
The 75-minute nighttime show, which begins after 5 p.m. Thursdays through Tuesdays, steers guests from room to room on a compelling musical journey through colorful sets and vibrant performances celebrating Marley's continued influence. Tickets start at $80 for shows that begin every 30 minutes throughout the evening.
Visit Hope Road for more information and to buy tickets.
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Thomas Sayers Ellis, a poet, photographer and bandleader who explored race, music, politics, academia and family in dazzling, erudite and often funkified verse — 'percussive prosody,' he once called it — and who was a founder of the Dark Room Collective, a noted community of Black poets, died on July 17 at his home in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was 61. His son, Finn Andrews, said that the cause was unknown, but that Mr. Ellis had been suffering from respiratory issues. Mr. Ellis grew up in Washington, and he was captivated by its hometown sound, go-go music — a funky, jazzy, wildly percussive form that sprung up there at the turn of the 1970s. He played drums in a few bands before starting his own, and he named his first book of poetry 'The Maverick Room' (2005), for a beloved local go-go club. In that book, he paid homage to the music and how it marked him. Mr. Ellis's high school nickname was Sticks, not just because he deployed them on the drums but also because he was skinny. 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Mr. Ellis was prone to linguistic pyrotechnics, both on and off the page. He was an omnivorous reader of the literary canon and an avid book collector, particularly of those writers not yet in the canon, notably people of color. He was also a film, poetry and music buff whose interests ranged from Gertrude Stein and French New Wave films to Bootsy Collins and George Clinton. In 1986, he was living in a Victorian house in Cambridge, Mass., with the poet Sharan Strange and others when he and Ms. Strange began putting together a library of works by Black authors of the diaspora. They housed it in a former darkroom on the third floor, and they called the collection 'The Dark Room,' a name they liked as a pun for a room full of 'Black books,' as Ms. Strange wrote in an essay for the literary magazine Mosaic in 2006. When James Baldwin died the next year, Mr. Ellis, Ms. Strange and their housemates made a pilgrimage to his funeral in New York City. 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Genuine Negro Heroism (GNH) is the opposite of HNIC (Head Negro In Charge), and incorporates pee-pure modes of black freak, black folk, and black soul behavior.' Thomas Sayers Ellis was born on Oct. 5, 1963, in Washington. His mother, Jeannette (Forbes) Ellis, managed a restaurant; his father, Thomas Ellis, was a pipe mechanic. Thomas attended Dunbar High School but spent much of his time at the city's block parties and go-go clubs. His girlfriend at the time, Sandra Andrews, gave birth to his son, Finn, when he was 17 and she was 19. Mr. Ellis attended Alabama State University on a scholarship and then moved to Cambridge, where he took classes at Harvard with the poet Seamus Heaney. 'In a city where everybody acts like they've read everything,' the poet and publisher Askold Melnyczuk said of Cambridge, 'he actually had.' Mr. Melnyczuk was an early booster of Mr. Ellis's; he included his work in 'Take Three: Agni New Poets Series' (1996), which he edited. In addition to 'The Maverick Room,' Mr. Ellis was the author of the chapbook 'The Genuine Negro Hero' (2001), 'Skin Inc.: Identity Repair Poems' (2010) and 'Crank Shaped Notes' (2021), a collection of poems, essays and photos about the go-go music he loved. Mr. Ellis, who had taken photos since his go-go days, was a sharp street and portrait photographer. Mr. Ellis earned an M.F.A. from Brown University in 1995. He taught at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., among other institutions, and earned numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim. In 2014, he and the jazz saxophonist James Brandon Lewis formed a band they called Heroes Are Gang Leaders, after a chapter in Amiri Baraka's 1967 collection of short fiction, 'Tales.' An enticing mash-up of poetry, jazz, funk and more, the group swelled to 12 members and performed with guests like Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, the singer and poet Lydia Lunch and the jazz bassist William Parker. Mr. Ellis and Mr. Lewis often squabbled during rehearsals. Mr. Ellis had a habit of recording jam sessions and then memorizing the music, and he was annoyed when they weren't later reproduced, down to the note. 'His memory was phenomenal, and he'd get so irritated,' Mr. Lewis said in an interview. 'I'd say: 'Thomas, we're improvising. We're not supposed to be memorizing.'' In addition to his son, Mr. Andrews, Mr. Ellis is survived by a brother, James; four grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. In early 2016, a year before the #MeToo movement took off, Mr. Ellis was a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when a women's literary group known as Vida published, online, a collection of anonymous accounts of what it said was sexual misconduct by Mr. Ellis. His classes were canceled, and Jia Tolentino, writing in Jezebel, reported on the Vida post and its ethics in an article headlined 'Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?' The New Republic picked up the story, as fodder for a piece about the workshop's reputation for the bad behavior of its male professors. For his part, Mr. Ellis made no public comment about the incident. Soon after, he moved to St. Petersburg, and he was named the city's first photo laureate in 2023. 'Language is always changing,' Mr. Ellis told The Missoula Independent, a weekly independent newspaper in Montana, in 2009. 'Language is not finished. Language is the thing that if you stay connected to it like I do, eat it enough, carry it with you enough, it will rejuvenate you. 'I don't mean 'save you' in a religious sense, but it will save you from a certain kind of dogma or mundane, boring existence.'

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