This is a karaoke hot box, to be sure. The space is built around a central bar that provides a slender horseshoe footprint in the bar’s front room. Horizontal wooden panels run the length of the space, creating what feels like a wooden shoebox inside of a brick shoebox sitting in the embers of a fire. It’s hot, if that isn’t coming through, on a cold Minneapolis night when the place is packed with an eclectic mix (skewing younger on this reviewer’s visit) waiting for their turn to fill the Vegas Lounge with pitch-adjacent screaming.
Though it certainly is not the case every night at the Vegas Lounge, on this night the volume dial wasn’t turned up to 11, it was turned up to 1100. Each scream from the sub-30’s duet’s rendition of a Taylor Swift song reverberated not just in the ear drums but the craniums of those in attendance. It bothered no one, clearly, as the space was packed, vibrant and pulsing with both the off-pitch screeching of two recent undergrads and the accompanying backup vocals throughout the Vegas Lounge.
The space itself is about as expansive as the term ‘shoebox’ suggests, which is to say not entirely. The slightly elevated stage up front caps off one short wall to the end of the space, the bar in back and the rest of the intervening space covered in low tables. Minneapolis staple, the pull tab booth, sits to one side and the area just inside the front door scrapes together enough space for a bar game or two. The confines here are snug, to be sure.