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| Shangri-La-La poster at Arlington Drafthouse |
Mike Meier lost a case and did something entirely different. He left practice and wrote a musical comedy about it.
Virginia attorney Meier represented the plaintiffs in Preiss v. Horn (9th Cir. 2013), filed in Nevada. Preiss, who served as physical therapist to Roy Horn, of the famous performing duo Siegfried & Roy, alleged that his services were terminated when he rebuffed Horn's sexual advances. He sued under civil rights law. Preiss's wife was a co-plaintiff, alleging infliction of emotional distress "after watching a videotape of events involving her husband after those events occurred."
The litigation failed. Preiss's claim got hung up on the question of whether he was actually employed by Horn, in the legal sense. The relationship was unclear and proved insufficient to support a civil rights claim.
Preiss's wife complained of negligent infliction of emotional distress (NIED). NIED usually is not actionable in American jurisdictions, as I've explained before at The Savory Tort. Insofar as there are exceptions, the plaintiff watching a video well after the fact did not evidence the contemporaneous observation required by exceptions for liability to bystanders.
The outcome is not surprising, and one need not think it dispositive of what happened between Preiss and Horn. Tort cases without physical injury—such as civil rights claims, defamation and privacy, and infliction of emotional distress—always are a heavy lift for plaintiffs, because they bear the burden of mustering evidence usually in the possession of the defense. Failure to prove does not establish the truth or falsity of the allegations.
Against the odds, Meier fought hard for his clients, and maybe too hard. According to a disciplinary disposition in New York (Sup. Ct. App. Div. 2018), the federal trial judge in Nevada found plaintiffs' claims in opposition to dismissal "not simply without merit but blatantly and undeniably so," insistence on the NIED claim "'absurd' and 'frivolous,'" and prosecution of Preiss's claim "needlessly, unreasonably, and vexatiously multipl[ying] the proceedings in bad faith."
The federal court ordered Meier to pay a sanction entered against the plaintiffs. His home bar of Virginia suspended him from practice for 30 days, and the New York court entered a censure.
The whole affair might have been a welcome excuse for Meier to pursue his passions quite outside the courtroom, in writing, stage, and music. His website Mike Meier Writes now boasts eight screenplays and three books, besides the present project.
The description of the screenplay Where the Aliens Are exemplifies the sort of quirky narrative Meier favors: "In this science fiction comedy, an elderly professor, along with his neighbors, a lesbian couple and their son, set out to save the world from an impending alien invasion."
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| Arlington Drafthouse marquee, July 2025 RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
It is a comedy about Las Vegas show business and human nature, with a sprinkling of drama and #Metoo. Joshua from Germany fulfills his lifelong dream of moving to Las Vegas. He is thrilled to get a job as the assistant to the retired Siegfried & Roy, only to find out the hard way that not all that glitters is gold. Joshua’s quest for justice culminates in a court case. But Joshua does not know about the Las Vegas tradition of "Hometown Justice." After all, that Las Vegas tradition began with Bugsy Siegel, the New York criminal who built the first casino on the Las Vegas strip, The Flamingo.
Aptly, Meier himself played Joshua's lawyer. The show pulls no punches in telling Meier's side of the story, both as to the plaintiffs' facts and his own plight as their counselor. In Meier's telling of it, he was victimized by Las Vegas insiders, a legal system under Horn's influence, and punished for daring to challenge a monied icon and power player.
Who knows. Vegas is no stranger to corrupt influences, and stranger things have happened there.
Of course, owing to Meier's penchant for the absurd and the fictionalization of the case, the stage telling is over the top and does not purport to be factual, wink-wink. It's an amusing romp at the expense of Siegfried and Roy, who are played as buffoons, if dangerous ones. Their comical, Hans-and-Franz-reminiscent accents put on plenty of comedy mileage. Meier himself grew up in Germany, and his speech bears just a trace of authentic accent.
Siegfried and Roy are both dead now, since 2021. Even insofar as their estates have lingering legal interests in trademark or right of publicity, All That Glitters is plainly a parody from an outsider's perspective.
The play has a dense script and an original score. Both vacillate between clever and banal. Some droll dialog earns laughs, to be sure. There is also ample jejune chatter that sorely needs rewrite by an experienced comedic editor. The songs are catchy in places, and elsewhere blister with lackluster lyrics. The cast did a superb job with what they had to work with.
To be fair, such a mixed record is to be expected in a straight-to-stage vanity project. Meier deserves credit for his determination. Polished stagecraft is not really the point.
Meier manages to put his creative stamp on a compelling story and somehow turns sexual harassment into legit comedy. At the same time, with Siegfried and Roy gone, Meier gets the last word in his case. And he clearly has a wicked good time doing it.
You can listen to five tunes from Shangri-La-La at Mike Meier Writes. I'm weirdly looking forward to Meier's forthcoming mockumentary, "So You Think You Can Trust the Media?"
It happens, incidentally, that a couple of weeks after I saw Shangri-La-La in Arlington, I visited the Flamingo in Las Vegas. I had a fabulous time at the Flamingo-resident show Piff the Magic Dragon, starring Piff, the lovely Jade Simone, and the world's only magic-performing chihuahua, Mr. Piffles, an act of America's Got Talent and Queer Eye fame. I got to scratch Mr. Piffles under the muzzle after the show. The trio is on tour now with All-Star Vegas, appearing in Cranston, Rhode Island, tomorrow, September 18.
